UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date:_May 11,2007
I, _Anuradha Chatterjee, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctorate of Philosophy in: Dept. of English & Comparative Literature It is entitled: TEACHER, BUT NOT QUITE: TEACHING POST-COLONIAL TEXTS AS A MINORITY
This work and its defense approved by:
Chair: WAYNE HALL JONATHAN KAMHOLTZ YASHDIP BAINS
Teacher, But Not Quite: Teaching Post-Colonial Texts as a Minority
A dissertation submitted to the
Division of Research and Advanced Studies Of the University of Cincinnati
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Department of English and Comparative literature of the College of Arts and Sciences
2007
by
Anuradha Chatterjee
B.A., Nagpur University, 1994 M.A., Nagpur Univeristy, 1996
Committee Chairs: Wayne Hall and Jonathan Kamholtz
ABSTRACT
My dissertation examines the close connection between classroom interaction and the colonial encounter. My field work re-affirms my belief in persisting with a pedagogy that self- consciously engages with issues of difference. My experience underscores the need to continue to engage with issues of diversity, but such an effort must persistently engage questions such as, who has the power to define whom, and when, and how? My students’ responses provided numerous learning opportunities for me and highlighted the need to continually question the validity of some of the pedagogic decisions that we make as practitioners of critical pedagogy.
As a post-colonialist and a compositionist, I view the quest for subjectivity as one of the central predicaments for a teacher of color. My personal classroom encounters echo Jacqueline
Jones Royster’s claim that, “‘subject’ position really is everything” (29). At the same time I recognize that even though identity politics is an inevitable character of a contemporary politics of difference, it can also become a form of cultural narcissism which distracts from the real struggles over class and power.
My pedagogical experience recorded in my dissertation demonstrates the uneasy position of the minority pedagogue in Western academia. It highlights the slippages between subverting the traditional colonizing role of a teacher and ensuring the goals of critical pedagogy which aims to create collaborative learning environments. The minority teacher of literature has to balance the additional burden of resisting the mantle of the native informant, especially if the literature being taught identifies with her ethnicity. There is a vital need to construct a critical, self-reflexive, multicultural pedagogy that makes space for emotional/personal aspects of living as a minority, and at the same time does not regard personal experience as the exclusive site of knowledge.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is with a heavy heart that I write this final document, which signals the end of my doctoral dissertation experience. I’m happy and relieved that my doctoral thesis has finally achieved its final form, but there is also sadness. I feel I’m letting go of a trusting, faithful and dear friend – my thesis.
Seven years is a fairly long time. And in these seven years, this doctoral project has gone through nine revisions. With each revision I matured a little more as a writer; but more importantly I grew as a person. In my writing courses I strive to convince my first year composition students that writing in a dialogic activity: it is hard, exhausting, even torturous. But that struggle between our thoughts and the words on the page yields a sharper, keener more incisive mind. Writing reflects our thoughts, but it also pushes us to think even further. Writing this thesis exemplifies this fact.
Those nine revisions also point to the extremely patient, painstaking efforts and mentoring of my advisor, Wayne Hall. Wayne is always there to provide guidance, support, comfort, enthusiasm, and above all confidence. He is an excellent teacher and mentor and his greatest quality is his ability to inspire and propel his students to take responsibility of their own learning; yet he is ever ready to provide direction if they get distracted and unfocused.
Jon entered into this project at a much later stage but his extremely intelligent, sharp, thought-provoking questions and comments have always made me reflect and question myself, which prompted me to work harder and think more clearly.
Yashdip, my third committee member has been my greatest support and comfort in all these years. His office door is always open for a friendly chat, a serious theoretical discussion, or to reminiscence about life in India. He has helped me to stay focused on the writing, and not get
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distracted with new ideas and theories. Above all, he taught me to take joy in small victories whenever I despaired and worried about my ability to complete this degree.
Although she is far away in Boston now, it was Maggy Lindgren, my composition advisor who was gave me the courage and inspiration to first visualize this project.
I grew up in a very close-knit and caring family environment, and when I left home to fly
10,000 miles away to complete a doctoral degree in America, I was devastated and distraught. At first, it was impossible to focus on academics, leave alone generate ideas for a doctoral project. I could not function. I had to replicate the closeness and comfort of home. In this too I was extremely lucky. I have managed to form a most supportive and caring friend circle. Some have come to mean so much to me that I cannot visualize a future without their company. I will take this opportunity to thank them individually.
A weekend without meeting Rohit and Chris is unfathomable. I thank them for their unending support, for those reprimands and jibes at me for taking so long to complete my degree.
Ultimately your criticisms inspired me to finish.
Ritesh, my dear friend, I thank for his patience and understanding. And, for those long, nightly debates and discussions, which exasperated me at the time, for I had still not formulated my ideas of the thesis. It was out of those frustrated chatting sessions that I strengthened my belief in my work.
My close friend and colleague Madhu, I thank for her highly intelligent comments on my work. You are a constant source of inspiration and hope. Niruj and Sathish are two people who have not been physically present, but their views and comments over long, though infrequent, phone conversations have inspired me and helped me to stay focused. Melanie, Anuvrat, Bikram,
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Prodipto, Venkat, Tazeen, Ramya, Renuka, have each contributed to this project by always reminding me of their belief in me and my work.
My dear sister Nandini, who is the first PhD in the family, is far away in India but her enthusiasm and eagerness for my work and belief in me has been a great source of comfort.
My parents, Rabi and Amrit initiated me to the wonderful world of books and ideas. They fostered in me a respect for learning, and have gifted me with a yearning for knowledge. This
PhD is my tribute to their efforts.
The closest and most cherished person in my life is my mate and life-partner, Anup.
Without him, this PhD would not have been possible. He shared with me his vision for our future together, but above this, he gave me the confidence and strength to visualize a future for myself.
His constant presence, love, and unbelievable enthusiasm for my work are my greatest assets and will guide me in all my future endeavors.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Are Teachers Born, or Made? … 1
2. Chapter Two: Staging Otherness: Experiences of Teaching Multicultural
Literature as a Minority … 24
3. Chapter Three: Communicating the Lostness of the Immigrant: Teaching
Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Tenant” … 32
4. Chapter Four: Situating Otherness: Teaching Love, Stars and All That … 49
5. Chapter Five: Ask me, I am South-Asian! Problems of Subjectivity in the
Classroom … 66
6. Chapter Six: Taking Multiculturalism Personally: Teaching The Shadow
Lines … 85
7. Chapter Seven: The Elitism of the Questioning Subject: Teaching Meatless
Days … 102
8. Chapter Eight: The Best Way to Learn Something Is to Teach It … 111
9. Works Cited … 119
10. Appendices… 130
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Chapter One: Are Teachers Born, or Made?
“When the poet Iqbal was offered some honorific title by the literati of India, he refused to accept it until they had first bestowed a similar glory on his former teacher. ‘But what has he written?’ asked the literati, scandalized. ‘I,’ replied Iqbal, ‘am his book’” (Suleri 184).
Iqbal’s reverence towards his teacher, articulated so compellingly by Suleri in Meatless
Days, was a sentiment that I passionately believed in. The concept of a teacher has always held a cherished place in my life. As a profession, my family practiced teaching for over two generations. My parents and my maternal grandfather were all teachers of English. Though they belonged to two different religions and regions of India, a common love of W.B.Yeats, and
Aristotle’s Poetics brought my parents together. I grew up listening to moving and inspiring anecdotes from my grandfather about his former students who would stop him on the street, their eyes moist with tears of gratitude, as they would fondly recollect his classroom lectures on the elegant prose of Thomas Carlyle.
My fascination with teaching was matched with my love for English literature. I did not associate glory and amazement with a physics or botany professor. But it seemed so appropriate to me to picture the brilliant teacher of literature as she motivated students to uphold truth and sincerity by highlighting that cathartic moment of Lear’s regeneration from the depths of madness. My major, English literature, worked well to reinforce such ideals. I believed that I carried, in my genes as it were, a grand legacy of speaking and living the elegance of English language and literature. It was my chosen mission to forward the family teaching tradition. My favorite childhood pastime was to simulate a classroom full of students, with me in front of the room, mimicking the teacherly stance and lecturing them about the exquisite rhythm and balance of a soliloquy from Hamlet or King Lear.
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Throughout my schooling in the Indian city of Nagpur, I was trained to view my teachers in an idealistic glow. I looked upon them with an unquestioned deference, not so much out of my awe for their knowledge, but more so due to the authority and respect which lay embedded in my concept of a teacher. This unabashed, unqualified, and unquestioned admiration towards a teacher solidified into a belief which continued well into my graduate student days. When I left for America to pursue a doctorate in English literature, I hoped to add a final stamp to my qualifications and embark upon an illustrious career as a teacher of literature.
Now, five years later, I no longer accept my mother’s cherished adage, “teachers are born, not made.” When questioned about my field of study, I hesitate to simply answer, “English literature.” My uneasiness increases when I am asked, “So, have you finally learned enough to become a teacher?” My exposure to post-colonial theory, contemporary theories of pedagogy, and the practical realities of surviving as a minority in America have irrevocably altered my idea of the teacher as the unquestionable authority. Furthermore, contrary to my earlier perception of the classroom as the unquestioned citadel of knowledge, I now view the classroom as a radical and volatile space, one that exposes the inconsistencies between theory and actuality, professional and personal, authority and resistance. Though I still associate teaching with the ability to revolutionize, refashion and remake the mind, my idea of who transforms, has altered significantly.
Moreover, these five years have changed my understanding of what English literature means to me. Rather than be dazzled by eloquent prose, lofty metaphors, and grand literary traditions, I now uncover hidden political agendas and highlight the subversion of rules in my reading of the texts. I had visualized my dissertation as a nuanced critical interpretation of some esteemed British authors like W.B. Yeats or T.S.Eliot. Instead, my doctoral thesis straddles
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multiple fields like border studies, cultural studies, pedagogy, post-colonial theory, performance studies and gender studies. This narrative in part details the process of how these changes occurred, but in the larger perspective I problematize the notion of teacher and teaching, with reference to my pedagogical experiences at the University of Cincinnati, a large state university in the American Midwest. It is written both as teacher and student.
In my first year of graduate study I was assigned to teach freshman composition courses.
The topics covered in these classes included reflective essays about the experience of being-in- college in contemporary America, a subject about which I did not have any first-hand experience. For the first time in my life, I was unable to perform the role of provider of knowledge. In all my courses I tried to use my foreignness as a means to initiate a conversation with the students. For example, I often asked my freshmen the exact meaning of Americanisms like “cool,” or “nerd.” Most often my students eagerly offered me explanations and did not seem to ridicule my ignorance. Oftentimes, these discussions proved especially effective as they led my students to speculate on the constructedness of knowledge when they realized that they had completely different interpretations about things typically American. Moreover, I learned to question the relationship between authenticity, personal experience, and knowledge which opened up issues of control and authority that I had earlier believed were naturally bestowed upon the teacher.
Within the first year of my coursework I also found that the New Critical approach that I had been schooled in during my undergraduate days in India was not the sole or preferred method of literary analysis. Theories of race, class, and gender provided me with new perspectives to re-read canonical works. As I struggled to find myself in the plethora of new jargons and theoretical terms, I confronted questions of identity too. My American peers placed
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labels upon me - South-Asian, post-colonial, ethnic, and exile - all terms that I had never previously associated myself with. I felt lost and alienated. Back home, I had been so sure of myself, proud that my upbringing bore all the markers of a well-brought up girl. But my unquestioned adherence to western ideas did not appear so noble now. For all these years I had prided my emulation of Western manners and social conventions as the marker of a civilized upbringing. But upon reading post-colonial theory, I recognized that my childhood fascination with the etiquettes of tea drinking, and the proper social behavior learnt from Jane Austen’s heroines were not hall-marks of a good up-bringing (as I had been brought up to believe), but rather had other serious and deep-seated implications. My exposure to theorists like Frantz
Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak compelled me to recognize that my inbuilt set of values and beliefs was a facet of post-colonial residue.1 Gauri Vishwanathan’s
Masks of Conquest shocked me as I discovered that the subject of English literature was first introduced in colonies like India, and was a carefully planned strategy to mask the oppression of colonialism. As Vishwanathan discloses the British succeeded in inculcating in their Indian subjects a love for the language and literature, with the intention of disguising the oppression of colonialism. One established proof of this unique British strategy is Thomas Macaulay’s famous
1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” which aimed “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but
English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”(430). I recalled with embarrassment my undergraduate days when I eagerly opted for American literature over Indian writing in English, dismissing writers like R.K Naraynan, A.K Ramanujam and Nissim Eziekel as too easy. In
1 For a further explanation of this term and other related terms, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2002) 186.
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retrospect I realize that my decision masked my prejudice against Indian writers, because I did not consider them good enough.
In one sense, the term post-colonial2 means a rereading of all canonical texts of English literature by situating them in the larger project of English imperialism and colonialism. This approach includes investigating how colonial stereotypes are produced and reinforced, with special emphasis on how western narratives exoticize the literature of the east into the reductive categories of “oriental,” “commonwealth,” and ‘third world.” The other sense of the term post- colonial suggests that we look at literature produced by former colonies as a strategy of resistance. Yet, not all post-imperial literature is concerned with resisting the European powers.
For some Indian writers like Arun Mukherjee and Shashi Deshpande, oppressions like caste, imperialism and violence against women are of equal importance and must be read in conjunction with the implications of colonialism. Mukherjee points out in Postcolonialism: My
Living that “simply because a text subverts or parodies a European text does not mean that it is radical or emancipatory per se” and that there is an urgent need to recognize the “racism embedded in postcolonial writers” (13). Mukherjee reminds us that a post-colonial perspective includes realizing the specific, cultural contexts and prejudices of the author, even though s/he is supposedly “post-colonial.” Deshpande in Writing from the Margins asserts that post-colonial denotes globalization and commodification of culture and labels it “the new, super colonialism”
(179).
As I researched different interpretations of the term post-colonial, I was repeatedly reminded of my schooling and educational experiences in India. Most of my English teachers at
2 There is no watertight definition for the term; in fact there is much controversy and debate surrounding even the spelling of the term with regards to the hyphen. For a discussion about this, see Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, and Meenakshi Mukherjee and Harish Trivedi, Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996) 195.
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the English –medium school I attended displayed an unqualified reverence for all things Western and a disdain for all things Indian. Previously, I had interpreted this stance to signify a cultured,
English-speaking school attitude; but now, in retrospect, I realize how our identities were being carefully constructed to maintain the social and cultural hierarchies established by the project of colonialism. 3 I wondered, whether my high-school teachers were willing or unwilling participants in this constant devaluation of all things Indian. I was perturbed by the uncanny resemblances between the colonial impulse to civilize the natives and a teacher’s duty to educate students. Previously I had never paid heed to the political ramifications of being educated in an
English-medium school. I recalled an incident at school when a delegation of British officials4 had visited it as part of an official tour and the whole school had been agog with excitement, similar to the fervor reserved for our annual graduation ceremony. I was one of the students selected to deliver the welcome address, and I underwent a rigorous speech training supervised by my English teacher, so that my accent came across as suitably British. When I was delivering the speech, I recall an expression of unease on the face of one of the British officials. Back then I had never quite understood that look, and soon forgot the incident. My English teacher was thrilled and satisfied and that was all that mattered.
After reading post-colonial theorists like Homi Bhabha, I gained a new insight into that childhood memory. The chapter “Signs Taken for Wonders,” from his book The Location of
Culture, provides Bhabha’s most explicit definition of the concept of hybridity:
3 For an informative discussion on the present-day state of English-medium school in India, see Sharada Nair, “Macaulay Derailed: English Literature in the Indian Classroom Today,” Jouvert 5.3 (2001), 23 June 2005
4 One of the people present was the granddaughter of Lord and Lady Baden -Powell, the famous couple who started the Girl Guide Movement of which I was a prominent member.
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Hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities;
it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal
(that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original
identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of the colonial
identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary
deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles
the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications
in strategies of subversion that turns the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of
power. (112 my italics)
Bhabha explains how appropriation of what constitutes western culture by Anglicized natives caused significant unease with the absoluteness of Western authority. 5 Bhabha shifts emphasis from the political to the psychic and includes Freud’s psychoanalytical theories to explain the concept of inbetween-ness and vulnerability of the colonizer. The uneasiness of the colonizer occurs due to the reversal or inversion of the gaze – “from the colonizer on the knowable colonial subject and back to the colonizer” (44). This ambivalence between colonizer and colonized opens up an unexpected borderland of negotiation and complicity, and complicates the conventional master-ruler binary. This dynamics of relationships can be used to explain other power hierarchies too. My practical experiences as a graduate assistant has prompted me to speculate about such connections.
My subjectivity as a South-Asian graduate student teaching English to a predominantly white student body could not be characterized as normal. However, barring a few questioning faces, none of my students has ever directly questioned my authority or my right to be their
5 For an excellent discussion and analysis of Bhabha’s concepts, see Bart Moore-Gilbert, “Spivak and Bhabha,” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 451-466.
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English teacher. Perhaps if I had asked them outright, they might have expressed their discomfort at my foreignness. Yet, there were times when I discerned a look of disbelief or even an amused expression on my students’ faces, which unnerved me. Some mentioned in their evaluations that
I was not their best choice for a teacher because I did not know some things. Others interpreted my attempts to engage them with these questions as my reaction to having had “a crappy college life” back in India. Overall, many of the students wanted me to behave more like the teacher. I was caught in a double bind: on the one hand I was discovering the colonizing aspect of being a teacher and trying to dismantle my notion of the all-controlling teacher; on the other hand, I was being castigated by my students for not being enough in control. I wondered if I needed to possess first-hand experience of living in America to acquire the stance of the teacher. What did it mean to act like a teacher? In my first two years as a student of composition theory, the most significant lesson that I learnt was that the academy and the classroom are not neutral, objective citadels of learning.
My reflections of high-school had convinced me to revise my notions of teacher, student and the institution. I was drawn most strongly to the theories of critical pedagogy. First introduced by Friere with Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and advanced by compositionists like Ira
Shor (Critical Teaching and Everyday Life), the critical pedagogic approach infuses the student with the power to challenge oppressive practices and ideologies, including teacher authority in the classroom. Composition theorists like Peter Elbow (Writing Without Teachers) urge writing teachers to develop safe classrooms which encourage the students to be more responsible about their own learning. Moreover, scholars like Peter McLaren6 shift focus to the students and emphasize the importance of theorizing about student voices and contexts.
6 Peter McLaren, Life in schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the Foundations of Education (New York: Longman, 1998) 2-10.
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I was excited to learn that many composition scholars have discussed the uncanny connections between colony and the classroom. Firstly, Xin Liu Gale (Teachers, Discourse, and
Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom) has compared the classroom to colonial structures. Gale quotes Bourdieu and Passerson to point out how “the legitimacy of the teacher’s authority is indicated by the space the traditional institution arranges for the teacher (the platform, the professorial chair at the focal point where all gazes converge), a space that represents ‘material and symbolic conditions which enable him to keep the students at a respectful distance’”(qtd. in Gale 9). In “Making Freshman English a Happening,” William D.
Lutz labels the structure of a traditional classroom as oppressive because “physically the room insists on order and authoritarianism, the enemies of creativity” (35). He demands a complete restructuring, “including the overthrow of all grading systems and of teacher authority” (35).
Secondly, the typical classroom behavior has strong colonial tones. bell hooks incisively exposes the apparent and hidden structures that make up the classroom and critiques the traditional classroom as a place where schooled identities are encouraged, and silence and obedience are most rewarded: “Loudness, anger, emotional outbursts, and even something as seemingly innocent as unrestrained laughter were deemed unacceptable, vulgar disruptions of classroom order” (177). Reflecting back on my upbringing, I was shaken to recognize that this sounded similar to the behavior code imposed upon me. This cultivated behavior was expected from most women/girls of good families in India. The constructed self of the post-colonial upper-class woman and the traditional classroom student displayed an uncanny resemblance.
The colonial overtones of the traditional classroom encounter become unmistakable once we apply some key post-colonial concepts like mimicry, ambivalence and hybridity to classroom dynamics. Challenging the argument taken up by Said in Orientalism about the passive and
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submissive role played by the colonized natives, Homi Bhabha characterizes colonialism as “a messy project of partial alliance rather than one of outright domination” (qtd. in Desai 533).
Bhabha describes mimicry in “Signs Taken for Wonder” as, “the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination … that turns the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power” (112). This explanation of mimicry has unusual resonances with the power dynamics in the classroom. For Bhabha, colonial authority operates by imposing the culture and ideas of the colonizer onto the colonized subjects, and encouraging the native to “mimic” the superior colonial culture. Yet, Bhabha explains, mimicry as a colonial strategy is also always ambivalent because it requires “a similarity and a dissimilarity: a difference that is almost the same but not quite … It relies on resemblance, on the colonized becoming like the colonizer but always remaining different” (130). Bronwyn Williams applies Bhabha’s explanation of colonial mimicry to describe classroom relations. “Teachers,” asserts Williams, “expect students to recognize their authority through the adoption of the culture and values of the institution … in such settings students are not expected or permitted to challenge the hierarchy of the teacher-student relationship. Their membership in the academy is contingent and always subject to the approval of their teachers” (590). For Bhabha, mimicry emerges as one of the most enigmatic concepts because “to be Anglicized is emphatically, not to be English … What one utters is never identical to the thing repeated” (87). Thus, the colonizer has to maintain a resemblance as well as a difference.
Bhabha’s deliberations of mimicry as a colonial strategy make one reflect on how mimicry in the classroom destabilizes power relations. Teachers intentionally set themselves up as role models to be emulated by the students, but how do they regulate this mimicking in order to always maintain and regulate their superior position? The de-centered classroom aims to
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create a collaborative learning environment, yet how does one establish the difference between teacher and student? According to Bhabha, the slippage of mimicry opens up the question of the authenticity of the original’s authenticity, a contentious term in post-colonial studies. The problem with claims to cultural authenticity is that this stance can project an essentialist position which is dangerous since it is contrary to the idea that cultures continually develop and change.
Furthermore, how does one ascertain authenticity if the identity of the colonizer/teacher is questionable itself? In other words, would a South-Asian woman teaching English literature be accepted as authentic/English enough to teach English? Moreover, what about multicultural literature? Was I more likely to be considered as authentic when I taught South-Asian authors?
Yet, my recent experience has prompted me to even problematize my identity as a South-
Asian. Reading immigrant South-Asian literature alerted me to a completely different perspective on India. Many diasporic writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Salman Rushdie, Amitava
Kumar and others referred to the notion of home as real or “authentic” India. I too shared their sense of nostalgia, but when I returned home for my annual vacation, the India of my dreams contrasted drastically with the India that I encountered; my friends back home were amused at my confusion and teased me as having become a videshi or foreigner. I realized I was holding onto a commodified idea of Indianness, which was in any case elitist in the first place.
I was struggling to deal with this ambivalence and to identify myself. In “When the First
Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” Jacqueline Royster examines subjectivity as a “defining value,” (29) and emphasizes the need to talk with others and not for others (38, author’s italics).
My graduate student experience endorsed Royster’s words as I struggled to find an “authentic” voice that would truly represent my subjectivity. But, which voice was truly mine? I was torn between a new, self-reflexive and rebellious self that questioned every aspect of my thinking and
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a cultivated, well-brought-up self that took pride in my western schooling and upbringing. For instance, once, standing in line to pay health insurance, an African-American woman took me aside to narrate how shocked she was to see the previous night’s 20/20 report on FOX channel on female infanticide in western India. She added that I must feel so happy and free now because
I was in a more civilized place like America. I thanked her for her interest, but could not help including a curt retort that stated my shock at the unfair treatment meted out to African-
Americans in Cincinnati. Even as I uttered the words, I was uncomfortable about waging this strange battle over victimhood. Indian community gatherings in America often turn into disturbing occasions. Conversations often veer towards emphasizing how rich and sustaining
Indian culture is and how spiritually and morally bankrupt Americans are. I have always reacted strongly to such opinions and argued about the gender discrimination and patriarchy that were masked underneath terms like tradition and culture. Instead of exploring new ways to define
Indianness, such discussions resulted in my being alienated as the subversive one who had sold out to America. Questions like, which side I am on and why I need to choose sides, constantly bothered me.
The situation got more confrontational because I was one of the few minorities in my department. Overcoming my initial shock, I had trained to re-present myself as a post- colonial,
South-Asian, female academic. Yet, even as I became politicized about my identity, I was conscious of the embedded tokenism of such a gesture because of Spivak’s warning in her interview with Bahri and Vasudeva: “The word post-colonial is used to cover all bases. It is even used to avoid the question: Who decolonizes? … It is used to block the investigation of the failure of decolonization, we see all over the place, and also the fact that the relay has passed to neocolonialism, of which we are a part” (71). Reading Spivak forced me to realize that to
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identify as a post-colonial included an awareness of numerous responsibilities. After reading
Fanon and Bhabha, I had eagerly attached myself to this label, yet this could be seen as usurpation because it conferred a marginal status upon me, which conveniently erased my upper class, upper-caste elitism. This was inconsistent with any honest attempt at de-colonizing the mind, for that required a persistent, ruthless, and drastic re-investigation of my social constructedness and acceptance of privileges. In international student gatherings I often related details of my colonial upbringing to white colleagues who listened, fascinated, as I confessed how I had recognized the colonial impact upon my upbringing only after coming to the U.S. In fact I had perfected this stance into a professional act; I was looked upon as the exotic subject, and I enjoyed it because I believed that I was setting up the terms of the gaze. 7 In actuality I was resorting to mere tokenism with this dramatized confession. Before I even realized it, I had become a participant in reducing India to a place of curry, exotic outfits, fashionable yoga
Pilates, and natural calamities. I felt guilty and uncomfortable pronouncing evaluations on India, and yet I could not disavow myself from doing so.
I was burdened with questions like, how should I, after being aware of the politics of post-colonialism, shoulder the responsibility of representing India, and, how can I mitigate the colonizing aspect of a teacher’s role? Even Arun Mukherjee is daunted by such questions as she reflects upon the impression she creates as a teacher of post-colonial literature in Canada:
The teachers and critics of third world or post-colonial literature in the west, then, have a
lot of thinking to do. They have to start thinking about the implications of the naming as
well as the structuring of the so-called ‘field’ first of all. They have to think of their
contradictory location whereby they lack power in the western academic set-up in
comparison with their colleagues … These very important issues, the material conditions
7 I use gaze here with a Fanonian connotation to suggest a look inflected with power.
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surrounding the teaching and theorizing of third world literatures, remain hidden thus far
in the formulation of first world theorists. (15)
Inspired by Mukherjee I decided to examine and theorize about my pedagogical experiences of teaching post-colonial literature because I too was convinced that, unless such experiences were investigated, the inclusion of minority authors could end up as a gesture of tokenism. hooks’ cautionary note is worth repeating here: “One cannot teach or present work by intellectuals from underrepresented groups in the academy and pretend that there is ultimately no difference between their work and the work of more conservative folks who are privileged by race, class, or gender” (141). Mary Louise Pratt too has pointed out how many English literature departments across America have revamped curricula to include authors and texts that have so far been considered the other. But Spivak8 argues that merely including minority texts is not enough, especially when one of the goals of teaching in the contact zone includes not merely enlarging the canon with a counter-canon, but dethroning canonical method itself.
I began my investigation by asking if the politics of representation interferes with the demands of critical pedagogy in the literature classroom. In particular, when a course aims to enhance the cultural understanding of the students, does the ethnicity of the teacher facilitate and guarantee that cultural conflicts are better understood? The relevance of these questions is amplified by Bonnie TuSmith’s presidential address at a conference on multiethnic pedagogy held by MELUS in 2002: “The instructor of ethnic literature has insider information, through research and sometimes through lived experience, and this data is deposited into the students’ minds. In the interest of efficiency and coverage of course material, this may be an effective approach. The danger is that it puts students in a passive mode of learning.” TuSmith’s argument suggests that maintaining an objectivist stance is the biggest pedagogical challenge for the ethnic
8 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993) 19.
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teacher. TuSmith warns of other problems, too, like how teachers of literature decide what the ethnic text should represent. Commenting on the unexpected consequences of taking unexamined pedagogical decisions, Tu Smith narrates the reaction of Maxine Hong Kingston when her novel
The Woman Warrior was taught in American colleges:
What I did not foresee was the critics measuring the book and me against the stereotype
of the exotic, inscrutable, mysterious oriental … Pridefully enough, I believed that I had
written with such power that the reality and humanity of my characters would bust
through any stereotypes of them … I had not calculated how blinding stereotyping is,
how stupefying. 9
Kingston’s powerful response made me ponder how I would teach South-Asian literary texts.
Would the fact that I was a South-Asian instinctively confer an authority onto me and make me a better interpreter of these texts? Would I be able to foster new ways of knowing and knowledge sharing in the classroom or would my ethnicity hamper students from gleaning new meanings of the text?
My upper-class privileges problematized my gesture of claiming marginality as a typical
Indian. Even though I was aware of the dangers of adopting any essentialist position about authenticity, I still could not help claiming an authoritative stance on India in my interactions with my American friends. But in the classroom context I would have to be careful about my subjectivity so as not put the students in a passive mode of learning. My concerns are echoed by
S.Shanker in “The Thumb of Ekalavya: Postcolonial Studies and the ‘Third World’ Scholar in a
Neocolonial World,” which outlines the added responsibilities on third world intellectuals as
9 Bonnie TuSmith, “On Cultural Contexts, Aesthetics, and the Mission of Melus” MELUS, Seattle, 13 April. 2002.
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“asking hard questions regarding their complicity with elite institutions and … making institutional critique part of the very fabric of their work” (487).
My internet searches for courses on ethnic literature or diasporic literature turned up ones with course goals like enhancing cultural understanding and identifying with the other. But was it possible to communicate the complexity of such issues in a ten or even fifteen-week course?
Did the purpose of cultural understanding not get defeated if students have to adopt it as a stance to fulfill an assignment requirement and to get a better grade? Jane Tompkins’ A Life in School has demonstrated how our pedagogy is embedded in the texts we teach. I wished to investigate how far post-colonial and composition theories had entrenched themselves in my teaching philosophy, and whether the goals of creating a shared knowledge and an engaged dialogue with students could actually become a reality in the classroom, especially if the course was taught by an ethnic other.
My project gained further impetus from Crossing Borderlands: Composition and Post- colonial Studies, a collection edited by Andrea Lunsford and Lahoucine Ouzgane that exclusively dealt with the connections between post-colonial theory and the college classroom.
Gary Olson article “Encountering the other: Postcolonial theory and Composition Scholarship” sets up the central argument of this collection: “The literature of post-colonial theory is especially relevant to our own scholarship specifically because it is so frequently concerned with articulating the interactions of discourse, ideology, and authority - interactions that compositionists have been analyzing for well over a decade” (89). Adding a new dimension to this perspective, Deepika Bahri questions the academic reception of the post-colonial migrant and marginal academic, and complicates the attention post-colonial texts receive in the academy.
In “Marginally Off-Center: Post-colonialism in the Teaching Machine,” Bahri warns: “The post-
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colonial academic is given the voice and authority to create a manageable, systematized, and consumable discourse of difference that, precisely through its production rather than despite it, leaves the normative intact” (278). I anticipated that my exposure and training in composition studies and critical pedagogy would help me handle the conflicts and contradictions imposed by the academic institution.
In the same collection, feminist and post-colonial scholar Min-Zhan Lu persuasively argues for the numerous ways post-colonial theory can learn from composition studies about issues of power and domination. In “Composing Postcolonial Studies,” Lu launches an attack on the unfair treatment meted out to composition studies. She points out how post-colonial specialists who join other literature faculty easily profess ignorance about composition studies.
They assume “that such ‘ignorance’ would neither endanger their candidacy for tenure … nor disqualify them from giving key-note speeches to composition conferences” (11). Lu’s tone conveys her frustration with the situation: “In spite of the explicit concerns of post-colonial studies to speak alongside the ‘other’ its traffic with composition studies has dutifully replicated the identification of giver, given, gift as that process has been traditionally maintained between literary and composition studies” (26). In her conclusion Lu states: “Composition is in a unique position to explore the vitality of the ungrateful receiver and to do so in relation not only to post- colonial studies but also to all emerging theories and fields in asymmetrical institutional power relations with composition” (32). Lu’s article has influenced me most profoundly because it takes up the challenge to confront the unequal and unfair status awarded to composition studies in most English departments across America.
Equipped with the theoretical grounding of composition and post-colonial studies, in the
2004 spring quarter, I embarked on teaching a course titled “Identity Conflicts in South-Asia.” I
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felt assured that my combined training in post-colonial theory and pedagogy would ensure that I give the necessary attention to the students’ resistance to the minority texts, and to my subjectivity as the ethnic teacher. At the same time I was confident that, alerted by the warnings of bell hooks, Spivak , Gloria Anzaldua among others, I would “unlearn privilege” at every step and resist all impulses to essentialize my cultural difference.
The following pages narrate my experience of teaching four diasporic South-Asian texts to an undergraduate classroom of twenty-five non-literature majors. The four texts selected for this course are Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories, Kirin Naraynan’s Love, Stars and
All That, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and the opening chapter from Sara Suleri’s
Meatless Days. All the texts focus on the struggles of South-Asian women as they establish their place as immigrants and locate their selves in the narratives of border crossing. A sense of disorientation and restless movement characterizes the lives of the protagonists in these works.
These writers also invent strategies to resist, subvert, mock, and undermine the oppression of patriarchal constructions and societal stereotypes like imposing the role of cultural carrier on ethnic women. The gendered nature of cultural conflict is the highlight of these texts because these women disproportionately bear the burden of negotiating the new world. Female desires are subject to constant male surveillance, and the diasporic community’s well-being is judged by women’s social behavior. Mukherjee’s Maya Sanyal, Naraynan’s Gita Das, as well as Ghosh’s
Ila belong to upper-class Indian families where gender roles are already pre-defined, even though their families portray a seemingly liberal outlook. As Mukherjee says about her female protagonist, Maya Sanyal, “She has been trained to speak softly, arrange flowers, sing, be pliant”
(The Middleman and Other Stories 100). Suleri refers to Pakistan as a place “where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just living,
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and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant”(Meatless Days 1). What made these texts especially suitable for my course was the trajectory of the narratives. Even though these characters emerged from families in which they were made to believe in their own inferiority as women, their narratives end up problematizing feelings of inadequacy because they (e.g. Ghosh’s Ila or Sara of Meatless Days) exist simultaneously in positions of power (because of their English education and independent careers) and powerlessness (because of their gendered constructions and locations). It was in the interstices and overlapping spaces of these contradictory positions that new cultural identities were negotiated.
In this course I wanted my students to recognize how, despite the several opportunities provided by a new life in America, choices for these women were not a simple matter of exchanging values. Often the act of defining a new identity could lead to conflicts that were profoundly antagonistic and even incommensurable. By bringing in concepts from post-colonial theory, I hoped to encourage my students to agree with R.Radhakrishnan’s concern in
“Postcoloniality and Boundaries of Identity" that “postcoloniality [is] as everyone’s concern, its ethicopolitical authority a matter of general concern and awareness and not the mere resentment of a ghetto” (178). To achieve this goal I decided to organize the class discussions based on some chosen post-colonial concepts like splitting, mimicry and hybridity. The post-colonial connotation of splitting refers to the spatial as well as psychological split. Physically it exposes the messiness between categories like west and non-west which are no longer self-exclusive categories, and psychologically it refers to how past, present and future are glazed over because of memory transference. However, I did not plan to introduce any theoretical readings as part of the syllabus.
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Another crucial aspect of my doctoral project was to highlight the contradictions, conflicts, and ironies that underlie the utopian promise of teaching. Thus, some central questions that formed the basis of my study were:
1. How does race and gender influence one’s role as a teacher of ethnic literature in a
predominantly white, mid-west university classroom consisting of non-literature majors?
2. How does the ethnic teacher resist being the native informant?
3. How can one resist institutional authority as an ethnic minority as well as de-center
teacher authority in the classroom?
4. How can one encourage students to meaningfully engage with the cultural other without
falling into cultural essentialisms?
The following chapters articulate my struggle as I confronted these questions, and tried to formulate answers. In one sense I attempt, as in Paul Kameen’s book Writing/Teaching: Essays towards a Rhetoric of Pedagogy, to answer the question “how do we increase the value of ‘the teaching of teaching’?” (qtd. in Bauer 430). My reflections describe how a solipsistic inquiry built on sure-footed pedagogical goals gradually transgressed into a complex intellectual journey that exposed crucial gaps and inaccuracies between theory and practice, and opened up questions about pedagogy, cross-cultural contact, identity, and agency. As a post-colonialist and a compositionist, I view subjectivity as one of the central predicaments for a teacher of color. My personal classroom encounters echo Jacqueline Jones Royster’s claim that “‘subject’ position really is everything” (29). My pedagogical investigations underscore that a South-Asian female teaching post-colonial “third world literature” in a predominantly white university pedagogically engages the very questions presented by the literature.
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The narrative recounts my actual experience of teaching the course. It is divided into six chapters interspersed with mediations on how the class events reinforced and contrasted with the pedagogical and post-colonial goals that I had envisioned. I attempt to convey the excitement, disappointments, and failures of my teaching experience. Since I feel obliged to stress the experience of learning as it took place, in some places my narrative takes the shape of a recreated classroom conversation, or a transcript from my teaching journal. For each chapter I preface the discussion of the class meeting with my own literary interpretation of the text. Oftentimes the class discussions resulted in significantly altering my understanding, as in the case of
Mukherjee’s short story, “The Tenant.”
I have based each chapter on the literary texts and pedagogical aims which I had intended for each text. My first chapter, “The Lostness of the Immigrant: Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The
Tenant’” narrates how my pedagogical experiences led me to recognize new connotations of some questions that Mukherjee’s short story foregrounds. The second chapter details experiences of teaching Kirin Naraynan’s Love, Stars and All That and underscores my discomfort when the students criticized the main protagonist, Gita Das, whose experiences in America strongly resemble mine.
My discussion of each literary text is often interspersed with questions of pedagogy because the politics of the personal and professional emerged as one of the most contested aspects of teaching the course. My theoretical assumptions regarding the politics of identity and difference were subjected to intense scrutiny as I found crucial slippages between my understanding of the theories of identity, and my personal experience of teaching as a minority.
My pedagogical encounter resonates with Dale Bauer’s thoughts about the underlying irony in maintaining a de-centered classroom: “The teacher has to pretend to give up planning
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and control in favor of spontaneity and dialogic teaching, all the while knowing that one has to plan and control to do so” (431). In place of a formula for the de-centered classroom, I propose that teacher and student are subject positions which in turn perpetually fluctuate between power and powerlessness in the cross-cultural encounter. Out of the thirty students who took the course,
I chose, based on a random selection method, Jennifer, Ashley, David, Jeremy and Dao10 as the student voices. 11 These five students were non-literature majors and native to Cincinnati. Dao, a
Vietnamese American, and another Chinese American were the only two students who belonged to a minority group.
In contrast to the popular notion of students as consumers and disinterested participants, my teaching experience was refreshingly different. The students willingly assumed the role of active learners; they in fact exposed my inaccurate hypotheses and speculations. Rather than attach importance to either teacher or student, I have now learnt to focus most intently on the interaction between teacher and student. More effectively than any literary or theoretical texts that I had read, teaching this course gave me a sense of actually dealing with cultural difference.
As a class we arrived at some useful meanings of theoretical abstractions like alienation and belonging. We also dealt exclusively with the overlapping layers that are embedded within diverse cultures and social groups. Moreover, the classroom space is unique because, even if it encourages and allows ambiguity and a degree of speculation, it also demands a certain kind of ethical responsibility as we negotiate the conversations.
I cannot assert that this course impacted my students as strongly as it did me, and unlike the Meatless Days quote that prefaced this chapter, I cannot claim to have had as profound an effect on my students as Iqbal’s teacher had on him. Teaching this course exposed the
10 All students’ names have been changed to protect their identity. 11 All mechanical errors in the student writing have been retained as in the original.
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inaccuracies and gaps in my theorizing; at the same time my students provided me with unexplored insights into the literary texts and into our formulations of de-centering authority in the classroom. Furthermore, I also learnt that some interstices are best left open-ended because as critical educators, we approach them with a pre-constituted notion of how they should be resolved.
As I inhabited the multiples roles of post-colonial scholar, teacher, and South-Asian minority, my physical self became the site where cultural negotiation, post-colonial conflicts, and pedagogical goals intersected. I experienced what Spivak has asserted about teaching in an interview with Laura E. Lyons and Cynthia Franklin: “It is on the cusp of the personal and the impersonal. It is a grand thing, really” (217).
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Chapter Two: Staging Otherness: Experiences of Teaching Multicultural Literature as a
Minority
As a first step towards setting up the course goals for this class I studied the personal experiences of teachers of post-colonial and multicultural literature in particular, and minority teachers in general in order to formulate my pedagogical goals. Much like other teachers of literature, one recurring problem was unsatisfactory student involvement. Even if students did react, as Lindsay Aegerter’s classroom encounters reveal, the reaction to multicultural writers was tinged with “impatience and infuriation” (142). At first, I estimated that the challenge to engage students might be resolved by the presence of an ethnic teacher. Even if they did not engage with the issues emerging from the text, surely the presence of an ethnic other in a position of power would open up some grounds for discussion. But as the following experiences reveal, a whole new set of relationships emerged when the authority figure was a person of color, and more so if she was a woman.
The underlying concern of every pedagogical experience narrated by a minority scholar resounded with one basic question: how should she represent herself? Each experience reiterates that the moment the teacher enters the classroom, both the students and the teacher are conscious of creating a lasting impression, an indelible mark which influences the classroom climate for the rest of the course. From my past experiences of teaching composition, the first day of class was always the most crucial, even for my American colleagues. I had often heard my colleagues remark after their first day of teaching, “This quarter I have talkers” or “This class gives me the creeps.” Typically, I would always utilize the first day of my composition classes to build up an affiliation on the premise that I too was a student who was learning about American culture. This usually worked to ease the looks of puzzlement that my students’ faces displayed upon seeing a
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minority enter the English literature classroom and stand on the wrong side of the desk. But things were not so straightforward for this course. I definitely did not want to build up an “I’m like you” kind of stance in a course which focused on cultural differences.
For Indira Karamcheti, a South-Asian professor at a predominantly white institution, the familiar pedagogical strategy of including personal biographical details in order to problematize and destabilize authority is not a viable option because “authority has already been problematized by the fact of visible difference” (138). Karamcheti goes on to elaborate in
“Caliban in the Classroom” that the minority teacher is expected “to teach, at some level, the personal but usually unspoken story of ourselves in the world,” thus making it all the more challenging to establish the attributes of objectivity and impartiality (138). She suggests that “the minority teacher can cast himself or herself as the traditional, no-nonsense professional for whom the personal has nothing to do with anything … To refuse to engage the personal--to silence it--is one way of resisting the commodification of the multicultural body” (145). Echoing
Karamcheti’s discomfort, Cheryl Johnson, an African-American who teaches African-American literature, wonders: “Do students empower me as an absolute authority on black womanhood because my experience of this gives me an infallible handle on the ‘true meaning’ of the text? …
My identity as an African-American woman professor is both confused and confusing; these racial/gendered/academic signifiers float in restless waters” (410 author’s italics). When authority in the classroom was itself questionable, relinquishing it becomes problematic. These confessions were disturbing already, and further research suggested unforeseen challenges and problems in teaching multicultural texts.
Rajeshwari Mohan faced students who used silence as a weapon in the face of the “third- world” pedagogue. Mohan’s enthusiastic attempts to unravel the imperialistic overtones in
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minority texts were met with “awed and respectful silence” in the classroom, because her
“politically correct liberal arts students” were too careful to not “dare” to engage with a minority text. Instead, they waited for the “text to reveal itself, if only through its proxy, their teacher, a woman marked ‘other’ wise” (9).
Piya Chatterjee and Priti Kumar both faced resentment and even outright hatred. Kumar was presented with a “Why do I have an English teacher who has not grown up to speak English as a primary language” (37) look from her students, which dampened her enthusiasm and upset her pedagogical goals. Chatterjee, a professor of anthropology, was sneered at, and her students left her “hate notes” (80), when she tried to incorporate histories of imperialism and colonialism into her lectures. In terms of envisioning a lesson plan and goals for this course, the question of subjectivity poses the greatest challenge. Given the fact that I was a novice in the field of teaching post-colonial literature, I worried about students questioning my right to be here and delighting in my discomfort as I divulged painful experiences of life as an immigrant. This was not the same as my asking simple questions about Americanisms in my composition courses.
Gradually I realized how identity politics altered how that knowledge was transmitted and received. Now I could appreciate the value of Spivak’s statement: “The task of the teacher [the immigrant teacher] is as crucial as it is chancy, for there is no guarantee that to know it is to be able to act on it” (“Teaching for the Times” 4). Particularly for a course that involved South-
Asian texts, I began to speculate even about wearing an Indian outfit as I was conscious that it might open up a discussion that might oblige me to reveal too much. After much consideration I decided to resolutely refrain from divulging any personal information or make any reference to my childhood and upbringing in India.
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The next daunting task was how to set up the learning outcomes for such a course. My internet searches regarding courses that dealt with multicultural literature had yielded phrases like “enhance cultural understanding” and “engage meaningfully with the other,” but what exactly did these terms translate into when put into practice? Even if I did not strictly adhere to them, it was essential to lay down some specifics to use as a guideline to anchor our class discussions. I had read critical essays that cautioned about the dangers of using abstract, vague sounding terms like multicultural. For example in Sneja Gunew notes in her article, “The
Dilemmas of a Multicultural Nomad Caught Up in (Post) colonialism” :
Far too often what gets called multicultural education is weakened and watered-down
through appropriation by those who would use it as a new way to silence rage rather than
honestly and faithfully address it … Literary works can serve as a kind of counter screen
in a field of other varieties of texts that often tend to screen (reduce and represent)
societies, cultures, and individual experience. (Edgerton, qtd. in Gunew 322)
Although the texts I had selected did not exclusively deal with the discrimination faced by minority groups, I hoped to introduce debates and reflections about multicultural issues by drafting assignments which would compel the students to feel some personal engagement with the issues of cultural conflict. One strategy to initiate such a sentiment was to set up assignments where students chose to affiliate with a literary character, and were asked to provide a rationale for their decisions. I wanted my predominantly white college students to recognize the embedded privilege in their social contexts. But my other, equally important aim was to introduce the notion of borderland identities and the complications involved in choosing a cultural self. The immigrant experience necessitated the support of a community or safe-house but this support was often contingent upon choosing a certain cultural self. Worried that I should not go
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overboard and overreach in my course goals, I kept these cautionary words of Min-Zhan Lu’s as a guide as I drafted the class policies:
While there are good reasons for why the teacher needs to make her view of what is the
politically correct position clear to the students, it is also important that we, as teachers,
make it clear that, for each of our students, the ultimate decision of what is politically
correct is and can only be theirs. It is their responsibility and not ours to make that
decision, although it is our responsibility to ensure that they reflect on the politics of
their reading and writing in the very process of generating it. (“From Silence to Words:
Writing as Struggle” 73-74)
In a critical writing course, which is the context for Lu’s words, this watchfulness is essential, but in a course that includes aims like enhancing cultural understanding, does the instructor’s responsibility gain an added accountability? Post-colonial scholars like Chandra Mohanty,
Aruna Srivastava and S. Shanker, all of whom teach in the western academy, have outlined new tasks for the “third world” intellectual. For Chandra Mohanty, the post-colonial, “third world” intellectual has the added charge of making teaching practices “combat the pressures of professionalization, normalization, and standardization, the very pressures of expectation that implicitly aim to manage and discipline pedagogies so that teacher behaviors are predictable (and perhaps controllable) across the board” (153). Arun Mukherjee cautions against the cultural imperialist stance that insists that the post-colonial text only mimics, parodies and subverts the west as dangerous because, as Mukherjee points out, “this strategy of responding to the literatures of the third world societies marginalizes them by placing the first world literatures as the originary cause” (14). Aruna Srivastava‘s editorial introduction to the 1989 Ariel issue titled
“Post-colonialism and Its Discontents” suggests that “The post-colonial academic, it seems to
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me, must work out her reasons for silence, for certain kinds of grading strategies and types of assignments, for certain modes of transmitting knowledge, for her defensiveness and ignorance on certain occasions” (4). Worried by my complicity in systems of oppression because of my specific location, I became profoundly uneasy when I read these accounts. I had a list of gestures and stances that I must avoid, but very few accounts discussed what worked in the classroom.
Some did offer some details of their class proceedings, like Ambreen Hai in her lecture on
“Teaching Recent South Asian Women Writers.” Hai’s classroom experiences revealed that students reading South-Asian texts tended to “highlight the enormous difference between the third world people portrayed in the texts and the lives of first world American students … I actually have students who say, ‘Well, that makes me feel so much better, I don't have any problems.’” For Hai “the challenge, then, is to show them the relation between the kinds of problems students face and the kinds of problems women face in third world societies and in postcolonial societies that they are not that different, actually, from the ways in the West.” Hai’s comments and other personal narratives demonstrate that, although it was frustrating, the project of theorizing about pedagogies was essential for everyone who claimed to adopt a post-colonial approach. Reading these struggles, it was evident to me that critical pedagogy was yet to provide a de-centering pedagogy that addressed the tensions experienced by the minority teacher of multicultural literature.
Ambreen Hai chose a feminist approach to teach some prominent South-Asian works that focused on deconstructing the role of women in nationalism. But this resulted in students reading the texts as social documentary. Hai voices her disappointment in these words: “They refused to see the figures in the text precisely as figures, as metaphors of some kind that require interpretive
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critical analysis.” One approach to combat this impulse of the students was to include a social- historical background and some theoretical concepts from post-colonialism.
But the question of how much theory to introduce, and when, is also a significant decision as is demonstrated by Kanishka Chowdhury’s account in “Teaching the Postcolonial
Text: Strategies and Interventions.” One of Chowdhury’s goals in his introductory course on postcolonial literature was, “to establish an awareness of the literary text as not merely an object to be studied for its so-called aesthetic value, but as a document which is intricately bound up in class, race, and gender relations within communities” (192). Yet Chowdhury’s account of teaching Peter Abrahams’ The View from Coyaba discloses that he lost valuable class time in his attempt to provide a socio-historical background and felt that he was reduced to a “mere producer of information” (194). Considering Chowdhury’s experience, I decided to focus on the historical context with the two later texts, The Shadow Lines and Meatless Days. Firstly, these two texts dealt more explicitly with history and politics, and, moreover, by the time we read them, my students would have familiarized themselves with some of the concerns that a South-
Asian woman faces both at home and from the immigrant community abroad.
While deciding on how to draft and frame assignments, I used Aneil Rallin’s suggestions as a framework:
Students and teachers have a responsibility to think about and through our most
immediate location, our selves. However, thinking only about one’s self can lead to
paralysis, insensibility, immobility, solipsism … But the phrase is useful in a wider
sense--starting with but moving beyond local worlds, making connections, and constantly
negotiating with the global in terms of accountability, responsibility, action. (149)
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Building on Rallin’s words, I strove to draft assignments that would not characterize the immigrant conflicts as completely “othered” but instead highlight how there was a degree of otherness in us all. To ensure that my students’ responses and reflections could be utilized effectively, I chose to design group assignments where students could momentarily displace themselves from their positions of assumed centrality, hear others’ voices, and also discover other voices within themselves. I set up writing prompts that were open-ended and began at the first stage in a conversation that is more under the control of the student. As the assignments put forth in the appendix section will show, I intentionally drafted prompts that encouraged writing about personal experiences. Furthermore, I tried my utmost to utilize these experiences as a sub- text in the class, and use the students’ comments to set the topics for classroom discussions and underscore different ways of reading cultural difference.
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Chapter Three: Communicating the “Lostness” of the Immigrant: Teaching Bharati
Mukherjee’s “The Tenant”
The first text that I prescribed for the course was a short story from Bharati Mukherjee’s collection, The Middleman and Other Stories. In this story Mukherjee plays around with different narrative techniques like omniscient and limited omniscient to communicate the intricate mind-games of the central character, Maya Sanyal. The split in self brought about by the process of physical displacement requires a person to step outside of him/herself and actually see what he/she is doing.
The stories in this collection are particularly intriguing as they tackle the interstices between the fixed binaries of Indian and American culture by problematizing questions of identity formation. Discarding reductive stereotypes about South-Asian women like submissive and docile, Mukherjee offers her female protagonists considerable space and agency. Her characters, she asserts in an interview with Alison Carb,
Are filled with a hustlerish kind of energy … We [immigrants] have experienced rapid
changes in the history of the nations in which we lived. When we uproot ourselves from
those countries and come here, either by choice or out of necessity, we suddenly must
absorb 200 years of American history and learn to adapt to American society. Our lives
are remarkable, often heroic … Although they [the fictional immigrant characters] are
often hurt or depressed by setbacks in their new lives and occupations, they do not give
up. They take risks they wouldn't have taken in their old, comfortable worlds to solve
their problems. As they change citizenship, they are reborn. (654)
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In Mukherjee’s fiction this re-incarnation means making a painful yet definitive choice of rejecting one identity over the other. Often this results in her characters discarding the traditional submissive woman stereotype, rejecting monogamy along with socially sanctioned relationships, and choosing to be deliberately promiscuous. This stance has made critics wonder if Mukherjee equates freedom for a South-Asian woman with sexual freedom. S. Shanker notes that the world which Mukherjee’s characters reject is embedded in monogamy and loyalty, which suggests that her female protagonists live by Germaine Greer's manifesto for "Revolution" where women should be "deliberately promiscuous.” He criticizes Mukherjee for “implicitly denouncing the traditional Hindu values of marriage, marital fidelity, motherhood, preservation, care-giving, and liberating her heroines by the 1970s western feminist norms” (5). Mukherjee’s choices prompt us to ask: Does freedom in sexual relationships lead one to a liberated, independent self? Can one reject tradition and the comfort of community and confidently survive as an ethnic minority?
Mukherjee explains her reasoning for focusing on sexual freedom for her female protagonists in her interview with Tina Chen and S. X Goudie for Jouvert:
I grew up at a time and in a class in Calcutta when you couldn't say the word “sex.” I'd
never said the word “sex” and we certainly were not allowed to think of it; I didn't even
know how the male anatomy was constructed. So for me or for my characters who are
coming not from villages but upper class, urban Indian settings, sexuality becomes the
mode of resistance or a way to rebel. After all, if you're coming out of a society where
sex is the unspeakable, the unutterable, then doing it or acknowledging your sexuality
results not only in individual rebellion but actually constitutes an attack on a whole
patriarchal, Victorian, hypocritical society. (“Holders of the World”)
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Other South-Asian women, too, attest to this policing of women’s sexuality. For example, scholarly collections like Recasting Women by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have demonstrated how the woman question has been a site for controversy and speculation right from the days of the nationalist struggle in colonial India. 12Thus, according to Mukherjee, her choice of granting female protagonists considerable sexual freedom is to be viewed as a complex act of resistance, and not mere lip service to a western feminist norm.
I also wished to resist patriarchy and negotiate terms like tradition in my courses, but I hesitated to advocate promiscuity, like Mukherjee. I was concerned that, while teaching this story, if I portrayed Maya’s behavior as a resistance to patriarchy, my students might misunderstand this to mean that every South-Asian woman who maintains socially sanctioned relationships adheres to and accepts patriarchy. I was also aware that the image of a sexually promiscuous South-Asian woman might reinforce the stereotype of the seductive, exotic, desirable Oriental who is finally tamed by the west.
Maya Sanyal, the central protagonist of “The Tenant,” has lived in America for over ten years and chosen American citizenship over her Indian one. Yet, she is tentative and hesitant about being accepted here. Mukherjee repeatedly emphasizes how Maya is ever-watchful of the impression she creates on the people around her. For example, with Fran, her new-found
American friend in Iowa, she discloses her divorce but holds back other vital information like her many “indiscretions” with men. She decides that her newly made friends, the Chatterjees, are the types who “like to do things correctly” (101); so when she visits their house for tea, she dresses
12 The construction of the essentialized “Indian” woman who was the epitome of Hindu tradition, was meant to be contrasted by the English memsahib, who was seen as idle, useless, and too free in her association with men and the “Indian nationalists constructed the Indian woman as a reconstruction of a middle-class Victorian woman, as the moral and spiritual opposite of the Englishwoman” (Grewal 25). This nineteenth century construction of womanhood continued to be extremely influential in the twentieth century, and as Uma Chakravarty has argued in “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi,” has been responsible in helping to construct the “Sati-Sita-Savitri” model that pervades much social practice in the present day.
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up carefully in a peach-colored sari, well aware that the color suits her dark skin. In order to gain time to “look over” and assess Rab Chatterji, she purposely fusses with the seatbelt. One pervading question that envelops Maya is, “Do I tempt?” (111).
My biggest pedagogical challenge was to communicate to my students that, beneath the poise and upper-class breeding, Maya voiced the unending predicament of the ethnic woman who refuses to passively submit to pre-destined notions of how to behave as an ethnic minority, or how to assimilate and be considered a normal American. Maya insists that, “All Indian men are wife-beaters” (98); yet, the moment she comes to Cedar Falls, she cannot help looking up familiar sounding Bengali surnames in the phone book. She is proud of “taking some big risks”
(99) and making a break with her parents’ ways (99); however, she has also faced criticism from her women’s studies group for being too feminine and taking care about her appearance (100).
Crafty and seemingly manipulative, Maya possesses a keen intelligence and an astute mind; she realizes the precariousness of her position, and has learnt to interact with her American friends with “the right degree of apology and Asian upper-class helplessness” (100).
The title word “tenant” conjures up images of home and belonging while suggesting the complex on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize and legitimize cultural hybridities.
Mukherjee’s portrayal suggests that to be a postcolonial is to live in a state of perpetual alienation, a state that is further problematized in “the alienated spatiality of the diaspora,” according to R.Radhakrishnan ( Callaloo 764). As a result, explains Radhakrishnan, “one can both belong and not belong to either one of two worlds at the same time … Belonging nowhere and everywhere at the same time, the diasporic subject may well attempt to proclaim a heterogeneous ‘elsewhere’ as its actual epistemological home” (764). The short story offers several examples that hint at this untidy encounter between the two worlds. For example, “Maya
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pictures history as a net, the kind of safety net traveling trapeze artists fell into when they were inattentive, or clumsy” (98).
This vivid image introduced early on in the story suggests that Maya is something of a performer herself, behaving like a daring, flirtatious woman in one instance and a traditional, coy damsel in the next. The story ends on an ambiguous note, but the reader is compelled to find answers to questions like: Why does Maya feel the need to be so watchful? Are the reasons for her actions more like a tactic for self-survival or an act of contrivance? Why is Maya’s need to be different, or to be “elsewhere,” so urgent?
I had anticipated that my predominantly American students would read this as a story about a confused, Indian immigrant who strays from her tradition early on, but ultimately chooses her Indian self by deciding to have a relationship with an Indian man (Ashoke Mehta), thus offering a neat closure to the conflict. Maya’s persistent self-questioning and distrust of everyone around was likely to be interpreted as self-imposed and paranoid. Her indiscretions with men would be criticized, and because she was South-Asian, they were sure to label this behavior as a corruption of the West. After all, Indian women were associated with vibrant saris, good food, and stable family lives- not with sexual indiscretions. My assumption was also based on the pedagogical experiences of Sharon Stockton, who teaches Latino/Chicano literature to a
95% white student body at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In “‘Blacks vs. Browns’: Questioning the
White Ground,” Stockton is struck by her students’ tendency to “depend upon overly reduced binary structures” and practice what Peter McLaren has termed as “corporate multiculturalism”
(qtd. in Stockton 170-173). She explains:
One student paper, for example, contrasts “Mexicans who are true to their heritage” with
“Mexican –Americans who have been infected by Western culture” and have forgotten
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traditional values. The students thus validate a closed and mythically pure “Mexican” culture and criticize the messiness of a border culture that is, in effect, neither “Mexican” nor “Anglo-
American.” (173)
I was certain that most of my students would criticize Maya for her un-Indian behavior, which she is forced to confront when she comes into contact with Mrs. Chatterji, who resembled a stereotypical, Indian wife: “Maya is astonished. She has taken singing lessons in Dakshini
Academy in Calcutta. She plays the sitar and tanpur well enough to please Bengalis, to astonish
Americans. But stout Mrs. Chatterji is a devotee, talking to God” (107).
The main pedagogical challenge then was, to sensitize my students to the complex choices involved for a post-colonial woman like Maya. I wished to emphasize that, although
Maya appeared confused, at least she attempted to enlarge her horizons and connect in some way to America. For her, the immigrant experience was not merely running away or “trying out one’s wings,” as Fran puts it, nor was America just a place to “live and work … but give back nothing except taxes” (105). Instead, Maya wanted to be different and make something of her life. Maya did not feel Dr. Chatterji’s superciliousness towards Americans (“These Americans are all the time rushing and rushing but where it gets them?”(101), nor did she accept Mrs.Chatterji’s fatalism.
Mukherjee’s story depicts how immigrants like Dr. Chatterji rigidly follow rules and customs practiced by conservative Indian families. These include maintaining hierarchies of caste and class. In this context, identity constructs like “Brahmin-ness” (upper-caste) and
“Indianness,” become tightly closed compartments whose boundaries are guarded rigorously:
“Dr.Chatterji’s horror is real. A good Brahmin boy in Iowa is in love with an African Muslim. It shouldn’t be a big deal. But the more she watches the physicist the more she realizes that
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‘Brahmin’ isn’t a caste; it’s a metaphor. You break one small rule and the constellation collapses” (106). Maya’s words show that, like “Brahmin,” even “Indianness” is a complex network of rules and behavior that is constantly under surveillance. One slip, and your legitimacy to belong is questioned. Mukherjee highlights how Brahmin-ness means more to Indians abroad than at home:
To resist and remain the way you were in India is to perpetuate, and more disturbingly, is
to valorize, an awful lot of cultural vices such as sexism, patriarchy, casteism, classism…
The immigrant writer decides what to let go and what to retain. It's always a two-way
transformation. To resist cultural and ideological mutation simply because one wants to
retain racial/cultural/religious/caste “purity” is, in my opinion, evil. I'm against that kind
of Hitlerian racial and ethnic pride; I'm against the retention of “pure culture” for the sake
of purity. (“Holders of the World”)
The sense of isolation that Maya Sanyal suffers is more than a self-imposed loneliness. My goal was to lead the classroom discussion in ways that showed how the oppressive binaries of tradition and modernity/westernization were cleverly used by immigrant societies to force their members to choose pre-defined roles. Immigration provided some amount of physical mobility, but cultural and emotional freedom was still largely policed, both by the dominant culture and the diasporic community.
In the Classroom
On the first day of class I was nervous and excited as I scanned the faces of my thirty-five students and went around the class asking them about their experiences with South-Asians or other cultures. A white boy volunteered to say, “All I know is that Indians don’t tip. Whenever I deliver pizza they never tip me.” A white girl added her experience with her Chinese roommate:
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“She was weird. She was so not like us -- all she did was study.” These responses were not unexpected, but I wondered when my two ethnic students, one girl from Vietnam and the other from China, would respond. After everyone had spoken, Dao, the Vietnamese Chemistry major, quietly stated, “I think South-Asian women have been stereotyped as submissive, but in my experience some of the strongest people I have seen are the women.” Impressed, the class listened to her in silence.
I started the course in an unconventional way by asking students to enact a skit which I had prepared, depicting some problems faced by South-Asian women in America. The story related in the play reflected Maya’s unspoken turmoil. I hoped that this 10-minute skit would initiate discussions about cultural stereotypes and the policing of women’s sexual behavior, which could then lead into an analysis of “The Tenant.” Although three students readily volunteered to read out the lines, the skit did not generate much discussion or comments.
On the other hand, the opening remarks to the Mukherjee short story were extreme:
“Maya is stuffy and silly,” “Maya is a hypocrite,” and “Maya is so arrogant.” Interestingly, no one directly attacked Maya’s bold indiscretions with men. This intrigued me, but I decided it was too early to make any conclusions about my students’ attitudes.
Throughout our class sessions on “The Tenant,” my students never made any critical remarks about Maya’s sexual promiscuity. They seemed much more concerned with Maya’s tendency to lie and mistrust everyone around her. According to them Maya’s reticence was a symbol of arrogance and pride. I wondered about the reasons for their silence about her various relationships with strange men. Thinking back, I realize that perhaps Maya’s sexual promiscuity was a bigger concern for me because of my upbringing. I had internalized the strict patriarchal
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behavior code so well that Maya’s capriciousness was a secondary concern for me. Here is an example from one of our class sessions: 13
Teacher: Let us look at the relationship between Fran and Maya. What do you think about their friendship?
Kristina: It does not seem to be a two-way street.
Teacher: What seems to be the problem?
David: Well, Maya seems to be reluctant to say anything. By the way, who is this Vern? Is he
Maya’s boy-friend? I am confused here.
Teacher: No, he is Fran’s ex-boyfriend. Let’s look at that section in detail … Why do you think
Maya does not want to share her personal details? Is she just shy or….
David: She does not seem to trust Fran.
Dao: One reason could be that Maya is very analytical, which Fran is not. So even if Maya had decided to confide in her, it would have been a mistake.
Dao’s comments suggest a first-hand experience of having been misunderstood; living as a minority in a white dominated university, Dao is likely to have shared Maya’s alienation. Even though I tried hard to extract some comments out of my students about Maya’s calculated behavior, my students would not provide any decisive opinions, and were not inclined forgive
Maya. They refused to view her fickleness as a survival strategy. Instead they were vocal about their sympathies with Shaila Bhave, the central protagonist of another Mukherjee short story,
“The Management of Grief.” In this story Shaila is widowed and as she is journeying to claim her husband’s body she contemplates her married life: “I never once told him that I loved him”
(175). Maya and Shaila, both post-colonial immigrant women, are poles apart. Hoping that a
13 All conversations and notes about the class are extracts from my teaching journal that were written up immediately following the class sessions.
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written assignment might encourage them to discuss their attitude towards Maya, I drafted a prompt that asked whom they would choose to invite over for dinner, Maya or Shaila. Unlike most other students, Jennifer eagerly identified with Maya Sanyal:
I would choose Maya as a friend … Maya and I would get along well because I like to
analyze things too. We should be able to converse well regarding life and the world, our
cultures, our misconceptions. Maya isn’t simple and neither am I. I believe Maya has a
good heart, as does Shaila, but she’s lost. Maybe I could be a better friend than Fran and
give her some guidance. I would want to talk about America and divorce.
Surprisingly, Jennifer’s words do not demonstrate a feeling of cultural superiority towards Maya. She is keen to learn from Maya, and is aware that both of them suffer from some
“misconceptions” about life. By acknowledging that she will try to be a better friend than Fran,
Jennifer shows a genuine concern towards Maya. The most intriguing statement in Jennifer’s response is that “Maya isn’t simple and neither am I,” though her idea of simple was as elusive as Maya’s. I was surprised that my students did not consider Maya as manipulative. The other elusive term used by Jennifer was, “Maya has a good heart.” This too was surprising because, based on Maya’s portrayal in this story, one was not likely to associate goodness with her.
Ashley, the marketing major and self-professed Catholic Republican, did not choose to invite Maya: “I did not identify with Maya’s desire to keep moving around and changing her life.” Instead, Ashley chose Shaila Bhave because “she seems unselfish.” Is Ashley more accepting of Shaila Bhave’s identity conflicts because Shaila has been recently widowed, whilst
Maya is rejected because she does not fit into the stereotype? Was Maya overlooked because she is trying to find her true self and using strange men in the process? Shaila, traumatized by the tragic loss of her husband and two sons, is portrayed by Mukherjee as hysterical and addicted to
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Valium. She wishes she could scream and jump off the bridge into Lake Ontario, but then admits, “I am a freak. No one who has ever known me would think of me reacting this way”
(178). Although Shaila transforms into an aggressive, determined woman by the end of the story, she also laments the loss of her past self: “Once upon a time we were well-brought up women; we were dutiful wives who kept our head veiled, our voices shy and sweet” (184). Ashley’s rationale for choosing Shaila Bhave over Maya Sanyal suggests an insight into Ashley’s attitude towards otherness. She writes:
If Shaila was over at my place for dinner I think I would be most interested in discussing
the differences between a “well-brought up” Indian woman and an American woman.
When I read about dutiful wives who never say “I love you,” never call their husbands by
their first name … I was astonished. I would love to hear her opinions on American girls
who go to school, work and don’t depend on a male for support. I would also like to
discuss the practice of arranged marriage with her.
Ashley rejects Maya because she is selfish; on the other hand, she overlooks the fact that Maya resembles the American liberated woman ideal which she wants to proudly share with Shaila.
Perhaps Maya made her uncomfortable because she was too different from the conventional western stereotype of the submissive Indian woman. Maya is more of an other for Ashley. Her tone towards Shaila is proselytizing. Though she uses words like “astonished” to suggest a curiosity towards cultural difference, I find her attitude duplicating the missionary zeal of saving poor souls like Shaila. Unlike Jennifer’s genuine desire to connect with Maya, Ashley’s attitude towards Shaila posits her as a subject for interesting and exotic comparison.
Prior to this experience of teaching “The Tenant,” I had always understood the text to privilege and prioritize the diasporic individual’s impulse to transform and resist the stereotype
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of a minority. Through Maya, Mukherjee is depicting that in some cases, one additionally needs to confront the minority stereotypes within one’s self too. I realize that, with such an assumption,
I was overlapping the identity of Mukherjee, the creative writer with Mukherjee, the social critic.
Yet one cannot discount the writer’s burden of representing the realities of immigrant life.
Although Mukherjee herself discounts the idea of speaking for new immigrants, she also admits,
“I'm very touched and humbled by the letters I get from immigrant readers who have read the book in their own language and have integrated Jasmine's (sic)14 adventures into their own personal/cultural experience” (“Holders of the World”). Moreover, Mukherjee’s non-fictional writing, “Two Ways to Belong,” points to a distinct agenda in her writing. First published in The
New York Times, this essay contrasts the attitudes of Mukherjee and her sister on immigration to
America.
The essay starts as a personal narrative but quickly complicates into a discussion about immigration: “My sister is an expatriate, professionally generous and creative, socially courteous and gracious, and that’s as far as her Americanization can go. She is here to maintain an identity, not to transform it” (271). Mukherjee labels her sister’s perspective as “narrow” and criticizes
“her un-involvement with the mythic depths” (272). Although titled “Two Ways to Belong,”
Mukherjee is, in this essay, advocating one way of assimilation over the other. She contrasts her sister’s attitude with her own:
America spoke to me--I married it-- I embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrats
to immigrant nobody, surrendering those thousands of years of “pure culture,” the saris,
the delightfully accented English….Mira and I differ, however in the way in which we
hope to interact with the country that we have chosen to live in….I need to feel like a
part of community I have adopted….I need to put roots down to vote and make the
14 Jasmine (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989) is Mukherjee’s most well-known novel.
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difference that I can. The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile
avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation. (273-274)
The underlying bias of Mukherjee’s stance did not strike me until I had read Dao’s responses to
“The Tenant.”
Maya is also examining the society around her and questioning ‘what does it mean to be a
naturalized citizen in the United States?’ There is no clear cut definite answer. She looks
at the people around her to form an idea. In Dr. Chatterji she finds the type of immigrant
Indian who takes advantage of the American resources but feels no inclination to give
anything back to the society. He is someone who voluntarily distinguishes
himself….Observing Mrs.Chatterji she finds the subservient wife who cooks well….and
maintains traditional Indian customs. Maya is truly lost in her definition of the identity of
the naturalized citizen. In the US away from home she takes on a new self….She travels
throughout the US at the drop of a hat, has intimate relations with strangers, and socially
drinks alcohol and has married a white man. However, she wants to keep hold of her
culture.
Dao’s words resonate with Mukherjee’s sister’s “need to belong” as well as Maya Sanyal’s predicament in the short story. Although Maya understands the limitations of categories like
Indianness, this fact does not diminish her desire to cling to this cultural construct. As she confesses in her essay, Mukherjee transformed her identity because she needed to feel like a part of the community. Her sister Mira expressed her need to belong by holding onto her Indian ritual and customs. Both felt alienated but chose different communities to deal with the loneliness. Yet
Mukherjee does not completely advocate her sister’s way. Previously, I had always supported
Mukherjee’s choice over Mira’s, but after teaching this class the choice was not so simple. So
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far, I had always considered Maya’s valiant attempts at re-inventing herself as the strongest feature of this short story. Dr. Chatterji’s parochial behavior offered a neat contrast to Maya’s courage to be different. After reading Dao’s response, I began to reconsider Mukherjee’s words.
I had subconsciously chosen to be a spokesperson for Maya and Mukherjee, and I too had chosen one way to belong over the other. I realized that, like Ashley, perhaps I too had been guilty of prejudice. Was discarding Indianness a simple matter of “surrendering thousands of years of
‘pure culture’ the saris, the delightfully accented English” (273), as Mukherjee put it? I had always viewed Maya as a survivor, a fighter and an adventurer, but my students looked upon
Maya as good at heart, hesitant and lonely. This evaluation surprised me, but they were convinced. They held on to their view that Maya’s sense of self was rooted in Indianness, although they did not consider Ashoke Mehta as her best choice for a mate.
The final assignment for this text asked them to work in groups and frame a matrimonial advertisement for Maya Sanyal, along with a detailed rationale for the choices they had made on behalf of Maya. Here is the complete draft of one of the group entries. 15
15 All mechanical errors in the student writing have been retained as in the original.
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Group Response to Assignment on Matrimonial Advertisement for Maya Sanyal
Do I interest you???
STRAY AWAY: women beaters, FOBs and married men! A BOLD, STRONG-
SPIRITED Indian woman wants an EMANICIPATED, SUCCESSFUL Indian man. I’ve made my mark with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Duke University, and currently teaching at the University of Northern Iowa. Seeking a man that values a woman’s mind and her quest for an education. Let me feel comfortable with you and trust you. Drink wine and talk to me all night about the wonders of mankind. Don’t hold my past against me. Be patient with me as I learn to cook and sing. Be straight with me and don’t bring drama to my life. Serious inquiries only!!
Reasons
In Maya’s matrimonial advertisement she purposely gives an assertive voice to single out the Indo-American male with similar values. Initially, she specifically filters out the type of men that she is not interested in. Maya doesn’t want the traditional Indian man, who she perceives as an over-controlling wife-beater. She’s struggled to find herself an identity in the US and doesn’t want to be burdened by the things that hold Indian people down such as the caste system….She is looking for an Indian man with an open mind such as Poltoo, having realized that not all Indian men are conventional as she had originally thought….Deep down, Maya wants to be more like the traditional Indian woman but with the freedom she has now. She makes many references to her mother’s words and is deeply moved by the realism of Mrs. Chatterji’s gestures and talents.
Maya has had her trials and tribulations with a variety of men in her life, including a failed marriage where she mistook sex for love. Now, she is more interested in settling down with a good Indian man who would understand her for all that she is.
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This group response forced me to review Maya’s predicament in a new light. Here my students have pointed out a new side of the turmoil that Maya experiences. Perhaps my earlier interpretations of the short story were influenced too heavily by my personal experiences in the
US. Being one of the few minorities in the department, I had been forced to establish an identity and belong. As I explained in my introduction, the de-colonized, post-colonial, immigrant,
South-Asian woman was a label I eagerly attached to myself. Much like Maya, I had learnt to scorn everything Indian although I did not adopt everything American. I would not admit it, but I often felt a desperate urge to celebrate Indian festivals or do something traditional and restrained myself because I felt I was valorizing patriarchy and caste politics by participating in cultural events and religious festivities. I would check my enthusiasm, saying all traditional things are steeped in patriarchy and should be deliberately resisted. In my attempts to remake myself, I had adopted a cynical and disapproving stance towards everything that was remotely Indian. Maya’s predicament points to another facet of many diasporic communities, where any gesture of solidarity means participating in religious festivities. The hindu temple becomes a convenient place for Indians to convene and meet, and yet this site is also controversial because it endorses patriarchy and caste based discrimination.
In our class discussion I had wanted to focus on the “lostness” that Maya feels because I believed that this lostness was an essential part of trying to define a new meaning of tradition.
But my students chose to focus on a different aspect of the “lostness,” one that I had overlooked so far. They did not necessarily want Maya to revert back to a pre-given idea of tradition, but unlike me, they did not completely write off the feeling of comfort and solidarity gained from belonging to a social group. Unlike me, or even Mukherjee herself, they did not judge this urge as parochial or banal. Though I was concerned that my students’ reasoning might reinforce the
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idea that South-Asians like Maya were ultimately comfortable only with other progressive
South-Asians, it was heartening to note that they did not consider Dr. Chatterji’s way of life as the solution to Maya’s problems. I hoped that eventually our class sessions would involve discussions to state that there were ways that traditional family structures and traditions could be re-worked and negotiated so that one might still maintain the structure but not accept the oppressive aspects of community. I realized that neither a pathetic self-absorption about one’s difference nor an unqualified celebration of hybridity can be advocated. It was urgent to keep asking questions but also remember what my student Dao simply put : “there is no clear cut definite answer.”
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Chapter Four: Situating Otherness: Teaching Love, Stars and All That
As stated in the previous chapter, maintaining objectivity in the classroom emerged as the most significant challenge for me. By embarking to teach such a course, I unwittingly found myself within the center of that intractable triangle of race, gender, and pedagogy. My students had surprised me by their exceptional sensitivity towards Maya’s desire to affiliate herself with
Indianness, even though both she and my students were aware of the compromise involved for
Maya. I had hoped to focus on the post-colonial concept of splitting for Maya’s character, but class discussions were inclined to discussing hybridity. The responses to the group assignment demonstrated that the students had grasped the complicated entanglement that is characteristic of hybridity. Maya’s struggle shows that there is a significant leap between claiming difference and turning that difference into legitimacy. The pull to one’s ancestral “roots,” however remote, is a powerful, emotional one.
My students’ unusual insistence that Maya would ultimately “be happy with an Indian man who understands her” made me accept the importance of recognizing what Ien Ang calls
“the double-edgedness of diasporic identity: it can be the site of support and oppression, emancipation and confinement, solidarity and division” (142). With Naraynan’s Love, Stars, and
All That, I planned to focus on re-presentation and underscore how engaging with cultural difference results in what Bhabha terms as “restaging the past,” which “may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and public” (“Articulating the Archaic” 133).
Gita Das, the central protagonist, is an upper-class, city bred, convent-school educated student from India who is thrust into the jargon ridden and academic world of Berkeley where she is slammed by isms and posts from all sides. Schooled at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour
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Convent, Ootacamond, Gita is perplexed to realize that she is “hot stuff” (26) because she symbolizes imperialism, inverted traditions, and a wonderful juxtaposition of power, eroticism and the colonial experience.
Both Mukherjee and Naraynan highlight the untidiness that is unleashed when one enters a completely alien world and is compelled to discard comfortable accepted roles and create new spaces. Maya and Gita are conjoined by a desire to go beyond societal expectations and gain something more from their immigrant status. But Maya’s understanding about otherness is different from Gita’s. Mukherjee’s protagonists are mature, outgoing women, poised enough to say, “You’re exploiting my space” (25), with the right degree of meanness expected from a displaced Third World woman. On the other hand Naraynan’s Gita Das is reserved, hesitant, and tries hard to “say something smart and nonchalant” (11), but finds that the only thing that shields her difference is “to be alone and to study” (5).
For our class, I wanted us to explore the different nuances of hybridity suggested by both
Mukherjee and Naraynan and recognize the cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of transformation. Naraynan’s plot is not the conventional linear narrative which moves smoothly from confusion and incoherence to self-knowledge and intelligibility. Instead, using techniques like flashback and juxtaposition of the past with the present, Naraynan portrays the many changes and challenges that Gita encounters. At the end of the novel Gita graduates and enters into a teaching job, but more importantly, she learns to live by a new set of values that she chooses herself, discarding the ones that were imposed upon her by her parents and societal expectations, both in India and in Berkeley.
In the beginning Gita Das typifies the trauma of the migrant described by Salman
Rushdie as a triple disruption: the migrant traditionally suffers a loss of place, enters into an alien
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language, and “finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behavior and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own” (277-278). Faced with this disorder in her life,
Gita looks for solace and comfort in little things like combing her long hair: “Books might be tumbled about her desk, assignments a muddle of index cards and incomplete outlines; but when the comb met no obstacles in that soft scented mass, Gita felt there was a flow and order to her life” (3). Initially Gita clings to identity markers like wearing rich, luxuriant saris or reverting back to convent-school prudishness in order to establish some sense of familiarity in alien surroundings. She builds a protective stronghold of social and moral values around her that circumscribe her life. Rather than resist tradition and reinvent a new self, her aim is to find Mr.
Right in Chaitra 2040 (March 1985) as predicted by Ganesh kaka, live within the social codes as outlined by her convent school education, and follow the advice of her beloved Saroj Aunty.
As the novel proceeds, Gita complicates her definitions of authenticity and representation by moving beyond stereotypical markers like saris and Indian food: “There was something about wearing saris to every major occasion that had been making her feel old-fashioned, as though she were holding onto every vestige of fixed difference from this rapidly moving American world”
(111). Questions crowd her mind, and soothing memories of long, lazy summers spent at Saroj
Aunty’s house are replaced by thoughts about “That whole houseful of servants, just for one person? Sometimes I think she keeps them all to give her something to fret about” (275). Piece by piece Gita remembers incidents from her past and deconstructs her upper-class lifestyle:
“Saroj Aunty, let me tell you. I know the labels. Nice means ineffectual. Handsome means narcissistic. Intelligent means a compulsive worker. Family-minded means a mummy’s boy”
(223). The most important realization that Gita arrives at is “above all we shouldn’t get too set in any definition of what will make us happy” (298). This choice of fluidity over fixity, negotiation
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over definition, is the crux of the novel and was supposed to be the primary focus in our class discussions. I hoped with Love, Stars that my students would comprehend that the choice of an alternative lifestyle was not a simple matter of discarding an older, conservative, Indian self while taking on a new, liberal, westernized outlook. It involved an interrogation of one’s values and ideals, and discarding the security and comfort of belonging to an ethnic community.
Oftentimes, as in the case of both Maya and Gita, one made mistakes that resulted in hasty marriages and hurtful divorces.
My other pedagogical strategy was to focus on Gita’s self-questioning. As the novel proceeds Gita’s remembrances of life in India lead her to questions, what characterizes an
Indian? As she recalls the details of India, her relationship and re-presentation of India changes too. Representation here does not answer to the conventional meaning of recalling something already defined. Instead, Love, Stars highlighted a more nuanced meaning of representation. In his 1997 lecture “Representation and the Media,” Stuart Hall explains the other connotation of representation which subverts the notion of a fixed, prior meaning. Representation for Hall is not an aftereffect but “is constitutive of the event,” which implies that “meaning is shifting.” Hall’s concept applies well to Naraynan’s narrative because it intervenes and contests notions about
India and America in a way that destroys the naturalness and normalcy that one usually associates with such constructs.
Already while teaching Mukherjee, I had experienced moments when I was tempted to blurt out, “I know this because I have experienced it.” For terms and phrases that were typically
Indian, I provided information and glosses but made sure that, instead of merely supplying notes, we arrived at the meaning as part of our discussion. By doing this, I believed that I was trying to undo any imperialistic stance that I might tend toward because I was the teacher and the only
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native South-Asian in the room. In discussing the short story “The Management of Grief,” for instance, students wanted to know the exact meaning of the term swami:
Transcript of In-class Conversation
David: What’s this swami supposed to mean. Isn’t he a priest?
T: Not exactly a priest like in a church or temple but a holy man.
Emily: You mean does he do magic and stuff.
T: No, more like an enlightened, knowledgeable person who has given up the material world.
Kristen: So, is he a hippie of some sort?
T: No, not a hippie, though they are often associated with smoking ganja, which is a drug. It’s more like they are valued for their insights of life since they are supposed to have pondered on these issues. People look up to them for guidance and advice.
David: Cool! So, do you believe in them?
T: Well, I don’t personally, but many do believe, like Kusum from this story who keeps repeating, “Swamiji says, we can’t escape our fate” (104). I have some issues with people who follow these things blindly, but as in Kusum’s case, they do offer some sort of solace. It’s a complicated issue.
Thus, I tried to not make a value judgment on the validity or reliability of swamis. But my objective stance appeared to falter when my students disbelieved the trauma Gita suffered in the early part of the novel. Thus, overlooking warnings sounded by other teachers of immigrant literature, I decided to talk about my own westernized schooling and point out the similarities between my own and Gita’s experiences. I expected that these anecdotes might serve to validate
Gita’s experiences of studying at an elite convent school, like her observation that “The nuns told us we’d get pregnant if we wore sleeveless clothes” (34), which my students found completely
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improbable. I also hoped to use these class sessions to introduce the additional theoretical notes on post-colonialism to provide some socio-political background to the course.
Similar to their first impressions of Maya, the students promptly came up with a list of
Gita’s characteristics: lonely, thinks too much about her studies, judgmental, cannot handle social relationships, feels guilty when she is doing something personal, reserved. I tried to keep an outward calm as I listed these on the board, but inwardly I felt as if a mirror had been held up before me. It seemed as if my students were mocking me; I was personally hurt by the derision and contempt with which they trivialized Gita’s insecurity. I had decided to introduce the resemblance between Gita’s and my life experiences later on in the class, but I changed the plan and confronted the students as I discussed my first few weeks of arriving in Cincinnati. I had always anticipated that the class itself would regard me as a “native informant,” but here I appropriated that position for myself.
Initially I had chosen to insert personal anecdotes in the classroom at strategic moments in our discussion of the different aspects of Gita’s life because it seemed like a useful pedagogical strategy; hence it was a professional decision. But their attitude towards Gita turned my revelations into a personal confrontation. Even during our discussions on Maya Sanyal, some students had mocked the persistent self-questioning Maya had inflicted upon herself. As the de- centered teacher, I did not openly show my disapproval, but I was upset by their lack of empathy.
I was offended that my students did not take Maya seriously and felt as if they were being unsympathetic to my concerns too. Also, it seemed strange to me that they did not ask me about my experiences as a South-Asian woman living in the U.S. The fear that they considered me not authentic enough to talk about South-Asia gripped me. Though I did not want to be considered the native informant, this blatant ignorance of my subjectivity actually bothered me.
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Now I realize that I was already perturbed about their attitude even before I introduced
Naraynan’s novel. Although they heard me intently on the day that I confronted them with some incidents about my early days in the U.S, they did not display any reactions, nor did they venture any questions. I followed up my outburst with some incidents about my experiences of alienation, but my students responded with silence. Pondering upon their reasons, I wondered if they felt embarrassed by my disclosures, or if they regarded them as irrelevant. The next two sessions the students were quite subdued.
What did I really want my students to gather from my disclosures? If one of my goals for this course was to inspire similar personal confessions about cultural conflicts from my students, this gesture could serve as a deterrent since it conveyed the feeling that the experience of fractured identities is unique to immigrants. Truthfully speaking, although I had talked about the impact of colonialism and suffering cultural devaluation, I had conveniently failed to mention that this anglicized schooling was a stepping stone that opened up educational opportunities abroad. This was the privilege that Maya Sanyal and Gita Das mask, and one that I too chose to overlook. I recall my uneasiness when the term Brahmin came up in our discussion of “The
Tenant.” As I explained the term, I emphasized the social prestige that it denoted and tried to lay out the controversies about caste and politics. But unlike my objectivity while explaining the term swami, I had not been so unbiased in my explanation. I hastened to add that the caste system was slowly becoming obsolete. When David asked if I was a Brahmin, I said yes, but I was visibly uncomfortable and quickly shifted attention to another topic. I conveniently forgot to mention that most South-Asian teaching assistants whom they met in their Physics, Engineering, and Chemistry labs were sure to be Brahmin too, and that this fact was not a coincidence. I was working to lead my students out of their comfort zones but I chose to not vocalize my privilege
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here. In a context where one is othered in more than one way, is the minority scholar accountable to un-mask all forms of privilege, or does one resolve this situation by advocating the stance that
I’m choosing the battles that I want to fight? This question remains unanswered for me.
A poignant example of Gita’s negotiation with cultural difference occurs midway through the novel. She has returned from her first late-night party of Indian graduate students with her
American professor Norvin as her official date. Gita is already quite perturbed because Norvin has just asked her about her opinion on sex. Bet, her American roommate, is depressed and tries hard to get Gita to share her intimate stories - but Gita avoids all conversation by announcing that she is too sleepy. In reality, Gita is puzzled by the new self that is emerging within her. She reflects, “In America, her dark complexion had taken on a touch of mystery, even for herself”
(102). Concerned that for the first time in her life, she may be going beyond herself, Gita remembers Saroj Aunty’s advice: “Power is when you have ways of controlling your own life.
You know, so other people can’t push you around. Brains are power, charm is power, and beauty too is power, and I don’t just mean the looks you’re born with but all the aesthetic fit of everything you do” (103). Saroj Aunty’s words cleverly ignore the power gained by money. I selected this quote for the next in-class assignment where I divided the class into groups and made them choose one character from the text and apply this quote, and then present the discussion at the end of the class. This group activity did not elicit much response for the other characters like Firoze and Bet, but the group that conducted their presentation on Gita came up with some impressive reasons: “Power and powerlessness exist simultaneously; she is self- analytical but lacks self-esteem; she must realize that people will not respect you if you do not respect yourself.”
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Did “respect yourself” mean that Gita was not aggressive enough, and still depended on gaining acceptance from other people as a validation of her ideas? Considering that we had already discussed the complex situation of Maya Sanyal in previous weeks, it was surprising that my students did not provide some reasons for Gita’s lack of self-esteem, although they had cleverly articulated her conflict as a power/powerlessness combination. This was a common characteristic of both Maya and Gita: although they were smart, poised, educated and clearly intelligent, my students could not figure out why they constantly required societal approval and acceptance. While I did not wish the students to make a value judgment on South-Asian women,
I wanted them to grasp the complex network of issues operating here. The physical displacement from a place termed home made these women vulnerable. Clearly they were in positions of power because of their education and financial stability; yet it was not easy to adapt to the
American ethic of individualism. Even though they too “juggled careers” and “did not depend on a male for support” (Ashley’s words), their struggles were somewhat different from those of
American women.
I wanted my students to realize that, although Maya and Gita had dared to be different, even while recognizing that, going beyond oneself and one’s community caused inevitable conflict. By highlighting this aspect, I was also trying to struggle with my personal questions of living in the in-between space. By doing so, perhaps I was guilty of imposing a personal agenda onto the class; and yet the question of how to separate the personal from the professional is an ambiguous one. Roger Simon discusses a similar predicament in “Face to Face with Alterity” and cautions that “the articulation of identities in a pedagogical encounter cannot be reduced to a personal desire for cultural acknowledgement” (90). So far my students had come to a stage where they could converse with Maya and Gita about their problems in the US, but how should
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one build upon this identification. I wanted them to find some similarities with the struggles of
American women, yet I also wanted them to maintain a difference.
In Our Feet Walk the Sky, Inderpal Grewal strongly attacks the convenient labeling of
South-Asian women as an oppressed category and points out how the discourse of freedom is unquestioningly associated with America. She laments that India becomes a uniformly oppressive place for women, whilst America is constructed as the land of hope, freedom, and independence (226). My classroom experiences confirmed Grewal’s comments. Even in regular composition classes, my students were quick to list freedom as the cornerstone of American nationalism. But whenever I pointed out discrepancies that challenged this notion, my students would feel personally attacked. I had hoped some student would react to the portrayal of Bet,
Gita’s American roommate, which might then proceed to a discussion about gender roles in
America. But none of my students ventured an opinion.
Naraynan’s portrayal of Bet has always struck me as unfair and biased. Both Bet and Gita are single women looking for love and companionship, and their interaction starts as a potentially nurturing friendship. Bet remarks, “Since no one else around here is looking out for you, it’s my job to see that nothing terrible happens” (80). This later intensifies into a patronizing obsession: “‘Watch out for depressed men,’ Bet ominously stated. ‘I’ve already told you that you don’t have enough experience to decode any of this’” (102). Bet ends up ruining the friendship by being too insecure and controlling. Midway through the novel, Bet unexpectedly resumes her overbearing, intolerant stance, and finally she fades into oblivion. Yet, Bet is the first one with an insight into Gita’s personality: “How are you going to be reading for this man if you don’t ever allow yourself to have a strong opinion?” (58). Overall Bet’s characterization reinforces the stereotypes that American women are too self-centered and controlling, an opinion unfortunately
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voiced by many of my Indian friends. Sadly, Naraynan does not decide to utilize Bet’s character to problematize white, bourgeois notions of female emancipation. When none of the students chose to discuss Bet’s character, I tried to bring up the topic, but could not succeed in getting a response. I admit that I was not too vocal about the unfairness meted out to Bet; this stance collided messily with my earlier narration of experiences of alienation. This was yet another instance where I was unhappy with the pedagogical decisions that I undertook.
The relationship between Firoze and Gita is another highlight of the novel, although their romance becomes too predictable as the novel proceeds. Firoze, a Parsi born and brought up in
Bombay, is steeped in feminist theory and identity politics. He is attracted to Gita from the first moment but she is put off by his insistent politicizing of every gesture. In a powerful monologue from the text, Firoze talks about his frustration with Gita. He labels Indian women as being
“bloody paranoid” about “the whole cult of virginity,” but then he goes on to speculate about the reasons for Gita’s insecurity with men by reminding himself about how awfully Indian men behave with women in crowded trains and buses (74). I drafted a group assignment using this prompt and asked my students to construct a hypothetical answer and to respond to Firoze from the perspective of Gita’s American friend.
Judging by my students’ earlier outbursts about how prudish and paranoid Gita was, I expected them to label Gita’s behavior as diffident and backward. Surprisingly, many female students applauded Gita for “holding onto her virginity” and empathized with her for “respecting one’s body.” I had underestimated the conservative upbringing of some of the students. Perhaps this also explained why they did not feel any concern for Maya, as she was the opposite of Gita in this matter. But I wanted to find out if sexual promiscuity was considered a problem with regards to Gita and Maya because they were South-Asian women or whether this is applicable to
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all women. Was their silence about Bet because they were embarrassed at her behavior?
Ashley’s response provided an answer:
I would tell Firoze that like Indian women, American women are held to a double
standard. If Gita is a virgin people act scornful towards her, but if she was not, people
would talk badly about her….However, I would tell him that it is not for him to decide
when Gita is ready to have a more intimate relationship….Also I don’t think the paranoia
these women feel is about not being able to control themselves. Firoze says ‘they will
completely let go.’ I think the paranoia is actually about how they will be perceived by
others.
At the beginning of her response, Ashley relates Gita’s predicament to all women but she chooses not to use the collective pronoun we or us in the rest of her response. It is always these women. I was curious about whether this referred to only Indian or American women too. I also noted that, unlike Jennifer or Dao, Ashley hesitates to use a personal tone. I often wondered about where Ashley situates herself within this debate. While she perceptively interprets Gita’s struggle as wanting acceptance from everyone, she does not offer any analysis on what Gita can do to counteract it. Although Ashley accepts that this is a problem which affects all women, she does not choose to share with Gita or Firoze (or me) about how she personally deals with these double standards. Does she identify with Gita’s insecurity? Ashley cleverly avoids answering that question. After the opening, definitive statement of establishing a common standard of oppression, perhaps Ashley’s abandonment of the commonality suggests that she feels uncomfortable and unsure about her own affiliations with Gita’s insecurity. Yet, Ashley’s insightful explanation of Gita’s state of mind hints at a lived experience of a similar paranoia.
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There were some students who agreed with Firoze’s analysis that Indian women were
“bloody paranoid.” For example, Jeremy did so but also quickly clarified his stance: “But this opinion is based on the characters that we have read about. Personally I have not had many encounters with Indian women.” Responses like these made me wonder if my ethnicity was obstructing the students from candidly expressing their views. Although my students had not explicitly reacted to my personal confessions, this response showed that they had preferred to play safe. Only Dao viewed Firoze’s intentions with genuine concern:
I would as a woman of Asian American descent commend him for his attempt at trying to
understand the seesaw and balance of Indian women’s experiences. On the one hand, an
Indian woman must present a respected, pure image. Even small actions such as being
seen alone in public with a man, showing skin…. is deemed as improper. Yet, Indian
women are exoticized and often viewed as property rather than an equivalent human
being…. Maintaining this balance and dealing with the disrespect imposed by men is
difficult. This leads to paranoia: consistently looking around to see if others are watching,
being careful about messages one send off and overanalyzing the behavior of others.
Perhaps my view as an Asian woman has a touch of personal experiences and feeling.
Dao’s comments reveal a sharp, sensitive, and introspective mind. I soon found that she was an exceptional student, far more mature and sensitive than her classmates. Her concern for Gita’s plight appears genuine; perhaps, as an Asian immigrant she had faced a similar paranoia and struggle. Admirably, she recognizes and appreciates Firoze’s attempts at trying to understand
Gita. The self-conscious tone of the last line suggests that Dao is suddenly conscious of having revealed too much of her own life, an attitude that matched her personality. She was shy and
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reserved in class, but was always ready with a perceptive comment if I asked her a question directly.
Both Ashley and Dao’s responses, as well as my earlier emotional outburst in class, bring out the immediacy of lived experience to the understanding of these issues. Ashley hints at a similar discrimination felt by American women but does not go into details; Dao’s comment demonstrates a unique understanding of the problems of being an Asian American woman. These responses address both the benefits and drawbacks of drawing lines and alliances to establish a common sisterhood in spite of cultural differences. The work of third-world feminists like
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Lata Mani, and others have emphasized how the issues raised by white feminists have undermined the predicament of the women of color. Valerie Amos and
Pratibha Parmar argue, in their essay “Challenging Imperial Feminism” that “Feminist theories which examine our political practices as ‘feudal residues’ or label us ‘traditional,’ also portray us as politically immature women who need to be versed and schooled in the ethos of Western feminism” (20). Adding to this critique, Madhu Kishwar, an activist from India, explains:
Western feminism is an offshoot of individualism and liberalism. Individualism is an
ideology which posits that the rights of the individual are the foundation of all human
rights. They consider each individual ultimately responsible primarily to herself or
himself…. In our culture both men and women are taught to value the interests of their
families and not make their lives revolve around individual self-interest. (272)
The individual writings of Kishwar, Parmar, and Amos all suggest that an understanding of how imperialism and racism work is essential to understanding how difference operates and how it is received.
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Ashley empathized with Shaila, the protagonist of Mukherjee’s “The Management of
Grief,” but believed Gita to be paranoid. Dao related to Gita and Maya because of her personal experience, but did not demonstrate any empathy towards Bet. I wanted the class to realize that we were all possessed by cultural otherness in one way or the other, but I was aware that this universalization had its exceptions too. However, I did not realize the importance of pointing out differences till I read their in-class responses to an impromptu writing prompt. This assignment asked the students to come up with five things about Indian men and women that they had learned from the texts we had read so far. I write in detail about Jennifer and Ashley’s lists to show how reading about Maya and Gita impacted their attitudes about cultural otherness.
Although I had not actually emphasized it much during our reading of these texts,
Jennifer impressed me by mentioning the caste system on her list: “The caste system is complex and unfair.” I was particularly intrigued by her remark about Indian men: “They too have obstacles (like hate, stereotypes, and ideals to live up to) to overcome and work through. They’re very critical of all. Especially their own kind.” Jennifer, like Dao, appears to have grasped the cultural constructedness that pervades the lives of Indian men too. But her tone makes one unsure if the comment about being critical is complimentary or not. Jennifer did like Maya because she too was self-analytical, but her tone suggests that she might be disapproving of this trait in men. But her remarks about Indian women are most fascinating: “They’re very self- conscious…. Some women are very critical of themselves, their people, and others.” Jennifer’s response brings up the complex question that had already been bothering me, one that I have mentioned in an earlier chapter too: How does one make useful comparisons while simultaneously not falling into essentialisms as well as not erasing the specificities of history and geographic location? Jennifer is making a generalization when she states that Indian and
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American women wanted the same things. Especially in matters of gender difference, culture emerges as a crucial aspect. Many Indian writers like Shashi Deshpande and Madhu Kishwar have persistently refused to be labeled as “feminist” because they associate the word with white imperialism. “In India, most of us find it difficult to tune in to the extreme individualism that comes to us through feminism. For instance, most women here are unwilling to assert their rights in a way that estranges them not just from their family but also from their larger kinship group and community” (Deshpande 272). I found myself in a compromising situation. While I wanted to applaud and appreciate Jennifer for her identification with the literature, I needed to simultaneously disrupt this identification by highlighting the difference in culture. In the context of the classroom, this becomes a formidable challenge. I was striving to form a community in the classroom context, but did this necessitate discarding my allegiance to the larger support group that I belonged to?
Like others, Ashley also was convinced that by ultimately choosing Firoze, Gita found happiness: “Gita has found a man that doesn’t need her to defer to him, and her statement that a little conflict can help you understand the topography inside can be seen as not only a comment on her new relationship with Firoze, but also a comment on culture in general. A little cultural conflict helped her to discover who she really was.” Even Jennifer, who earlier seemed to like
Maya Sanyal because they were both analytical, is critical of Gita’s constant searching:
She does not have self-confidence due to possibly being too smart…. She has
conflicts within her expectations as a student and an Indian woman. Since she is
apologetic when she comments she is analytically powerless…. Gita is somewhat of a
lost soul searching for definition because her knowledge hinders her…. You find her
thinking all kinds of things about others but she doesn’t always apply this to herself.
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While Ashley oversimplifies Gita’s conflict, Jennifer undermines it by suggesting that Gita is questioning way too much. Ashley and Jennifer do not discern the importance of conflict and questioning, or the turmoil of going against the community. Previously, I had always been unimpressed by the violent opposition of Indian writers like Madhu Kishwar and Shashi
Deshpande to the term “feminist,” but teaching this text compelled me to think more deeply about the politics of naming. The experience of trying to convey cultural difference during this course had sensitized me to the commonality of oppression faced by women. At the same time the intractable rift between cultures and how these oppressions were interpreted was highlighted.
As the teacher I was required to avoid binaries with regards to oppression, and also to formulate strategies which challenged oppression at every level. Interestingly, as the course proceeded, my students themselves found a way out of this predicament.
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Chapter Five: Ask me, I am South-Asian! Problems of Subjectivity in the Classroom
The problems faced by the critical educator who is considered the other16 has long been a topic of significant discussion amongst feminist educators and composition scholars. Cynthia
Hogue, Kim Parker and Meredith Miller, collaborative authors of “Talking The Talk and
Walking the Walk: Ethical Pedagogy in the Multicultural Classroom,” for example, collectively assent that the white, feminist educator occupies a particularly tricky position in relation to the hierarchical structure of the classroom. They share experiences of students confronting and challenging them for not being authoritative enough. Pointing out inadequacies in the seventies’ pedagogical model that encourages teachers to develop styles that are non-authoritative and nurturing, Kim Parker notes, “Our discussions seem to center around the problem of respecting and creating a safe space for our students more than they do around acknowledging our own complicated positions…. The equating of objectivity with knowledge leaves the feminist educator without a way to situate herself-without a subjectivity” (91). In their conclusion, the writers emphasize that the classroom cannot be a safe place only by the efforts of the instructor, and they underscore the need for flexibility on the part of the feminist educator in responding to incidents of student resistance and confronting racism in the classroom.
Another set of problems for the minority teacher who follows a critical pedagogical style is addressed in the article “When the ‘Other’ is the Teacher: Implications of Teacher Diversity in
Higher Education.” Here Lucila Vargas, a Latino teaching at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, documents accounts of professors who are seen as other by their students and who, consequently, face multiple challenges. One professor interviewed by Vargas claims that “Being seen as other by the students does not promote optimum teaching-learning experience. It gets in the way” (365). Vargas, citing her own experience, confesses, “Since I am an immigrant, some
16 In this dissertation I use the term other to primarily characterize a person who is not white or not male.
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students feel that I should not criticize any aspects of the U.S. society” (366). Quoting examples from her student evaluations, she notes, “Some of my students’ comments have an admonishing tone. ‘Prof Vargas,’ one student writes, ‘puts too much emphasis on cultural differences for this course not to be a cultural diversity class. Also, she should respect Americans if she’s going to live here’” (366).
In “Women of Color in the Academy: Where’s Our Authority in the Classroom?”
Juanita Johnson-Bailey and Ming-Yeh underscore the inadequacies of critical and feminist pedagogical methods that de-emphasize the role of the teacher. For them the classroom becomes a “contested terrain,” and relinquishing authority is fraught with problems because they question whether authority exists in the first place” (113). The article narrates some disturbing classroom situations faced by these two women, and it puts forth some discomforting questions:
Although Paulo Freire maintains that it is incumbent on those who wish to engage in
liberatory education to use a dialogical model to decolonize their students’ minds, where
does a feminist educator of color find her place in this complicated feminist pedagogical
quagmire as she herself struggles to claim and exercise her own voice? (117)
Highlighting the tenuous associations between authority and minority status, Johnson-Bailey and
Ming-Yeh maintain that “For women of color the classroom is even more treacherous because race adds another layer of supposed attributes” (110). Based on their experiences, Bailey and
Ming-Yeh advocate asserting their authority because it “could be educational and inspirational for students who rarely see women of color assume the role of experts or leaders in the public arena” (120).
Alerted by these pedagogical experiences, I had anticipated that my students would exhibit some resistance and antagonism to a woman of color in the authoritative role. As narrated
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in the earlier chapters, my students showed no apparent reaction to my presence, nor did they question me about my life in India. As the weeks progressed, my students’ polite manner unnerved me. I wondered, “is there a hidden mockery behind their blank stares?” At the same time, I was perturbed by my behavior: “Had I not,” I asked myself, “striven hard to refrain from being looked upon as the native informant?” Confused and unsure about how to interpret their responses and gain insight into my unexpected reactions, I designed an unusual group assignment, hoping to get some relief from my consternation.
Pamela Caughie’s book Passing and Pedagogy served as the principal inspiration for this assignment. In her study, Caughie details the various connotations of passing, a concept that implies a misrepresentation of one’s self and highlights its intimate relationship with pedagogy.
She explains: “The dynamics of the pedagogical exchange can render ineffectual, even suspect, the positions (subject positions, but also theoretical and political positions) we so carefully assume in our writing, forcing us to be more accountable than we can possibly be in the relatively isolated and structurally bounded act of composing” (4). Excited by the learning opportunities offered by the idea of “role-reversal,” both for my students and for myself, I used
Caughie’s suggestion and formulated an assignment that required the students to role-play as teachers and teach a short story to the rest of the class. Rather than stand aside and watch over them, I chose to role-play as the student, while grading their presentations at the same time. I imagined that the very act of representing a South-Asian text would complicate and displace any fixed sense of the knowledge of the other for my students.
I was closely following Aruna Srivastava’s cautionary words where she notes that “The post-colonial academic … must work out her reasons for silence, for certain kinds of grading strategies and types of assignments, for certain modes of transmitting knowledge, for her
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defensiveness and ignorance on certain occasions” (4). Thus, I discussed the grading rubric17 with my students and worked out the goals and the format of the teaching sessions only after undertaking an open discussion with them. The students were assembled into groups of five students each, and they were assigned specific dates for their teaching sessions with a two-week preparation time. The text selection consisted of four stories chosen from Bharati Mukherjee’s short story collection The Middleman and Other Stories and two from Chitra Divakaruni’s collection Arranged Marriage. Displacement and negotiation were the principal themes for all the stories, with a South-Asian woman as the main protagonist. My students were asked to submit a two-page response in which they reflected on their experience of teaching. Among other things, I was curious about whether they would represent themselves as the native informant as they donned the role of the teacher or whether the foreignness of the text might be a deterrent.
Being the teacher requires an intimate and thorough knowledge of the subject so that one is able effectively to teach a class. I was curious to see how the students might live up to this identification. “Would the fact,” I wondered, “that I (the role-playing student) was the only
South-Asian present in the class affect their teaching session?” Arguably, I could not ignore the fallaciousness of my role as the student since I was the one grading their teaching abilities. Still,
I assumed that the very act of physical displacement would lead to some sort of dismantling of assumptions. In the draft of the assignment I had intentionally placed the word “teach” in quotation marks. I was curious as to whether my students would interpret the teacher to be a
South-Asian woman (i.e., would they mimic me in particular, or would they role-play a teacher as a general construct?) I was also interested to observe their pedagogy: would it be de-centered,
17 All prompts for this assignment are displayed in the appendix of this chapter. The appendix material appears exactly as presented to the students.
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or would these newly appointed teachers resort to the traditional lecture mode, with the teacher in the role of knowledge giver?
The Mid-Term
The student groups were asked to choose a name for their group. As is evident from group names that follow, the choice of names was in itself intriguing. I wondered whether these names emerged from the recent onslaught of Bollywood films that had flooded our school library.
Before I highlight the unusual pedagogical lessons that emerged from this (im-)personate-the- teacher experience, here are selected extracts from my teaching journal that were entered immediately following the class sessions:
May 3rd: Bombay teaches “The Wife’s Story”
This story is an all-time favorite. Moreover, this group has been visibly enthusiastic about their presentations and even came in thirty minutes early, in order to practice for their presentation.
They seemed poised, confident and well-prepared-- almost too well-prepared. I seated myself in the second-last row of the class, in order to effectively mingle with the students; as I pretended to look bored, as if to give a true re-presentation of being a student, it seemed strange that I thought of behaving like that. The students used colorful power-point slides, with pictures and photos of
Indian-looking models. The presentation was followed up by a game of Jeopardy; one of the categories was titled “Culterfying Culture.” I felt uneasy looking at the glossy photos that were supposed to represent the trauma of the recently immigrated women.
May 5th: Curry Elephants teaches “Doors”
These students seem really computer savvy. And they brought along some “Indian” snacks and candy as awards for the students who answered the questions on the text. A perplexing moment came when Patrick specifically asked me, “Anu, can you name one main character?” Alarmed, I
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stammered out, “Err… Preeti, Raj.” Patrick smirked back, “I would have settled for a yes.
Anyway, do you want some candy?” I am a bit shaken, but impressed.
Their presentation kept insisting on how Preeti chose the American self and discarded the Indian one. I thought I had dwelt enough upon the impossibility of choosing one’s self. I could not believe it when Ashley blurted out, “Indian culture is wrong!” Whatever did she mean by that?
May 12th: Dowry teaches “Danny’s Girls”
Dowry! Why did they select that name? I have been so tempted to talk to them about it. Did they know the complex history of this word? I should have chosen to teach this story myself…. It poignantly includes the class issues and brings out their effect on immigration. The plight of illegal workers and class hierarchy, depicted here, made me question the representative-ness of my text selection. So far, the other that I had been theorizing about was the privileged, upper- class woman. Wasn’t I myself orientalizing otherness? I should have focused more upon the class issue embedded in Love, Stars by focusing upon Ayah’s character. The power-points have become too predictable. Illegal workers! Does this image come anywhere close to the present condition of illegal immigrants? Do they not understand the incongruity of using this image for such a story, or are they trying to mock the issues involved here?
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What do they know about life in India?
My goal in asking students to teach a South-Asian text was to sensitize them to the politics of representation and othering. Their presentations and written responses demonstrated that they had successfully suspended their cultural inscriptions and willingly entered the text. But I felt slighted that my students did not ask me for any information, even as they prepared their presentations. At first I was happy about their being self-sufficient, but then doubts that perhaps they do not consider me authentic enough to provide them with details crept into my mind.
I was critical of their presentations because I felt that they were overly reductive and patronizing about identity concerns, and because they had reduced and trivialized life in India into a power-point presentation. “What did they know of life in India?” was a question that reverberated in my mind throughout the presentations. But, at the same time, I was compelled to ask, did I know enough about the real life in India? Wasn’t I, too, essentializing here? Owing to my specific gendered ethnicity, I had chosen to claim an insider’s knowledge and irresponsibly
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ignored the class-based specificity of the post-colonial South-Asian experience. I assumed that I had trained myself to be objective enough and not resort to any generalizations. But my continued tendency to allude to my Indian experience compelled me to re-examine the insistence on objectivity and detachment that is expected from a liberal educator.
In “The (in)Visibility of the Person(al) in Academe,” Ruth Spack addresses similar concerns as she narrates her struggles with reconciling teacher authority and her experiences as a
Jewish immigrant in the US. For Spack, although her “whiteness” is visible, her religion is not very easy to read. She confesses that “in the current climate of academic multiculturalism, it is difficult to view myself as a member of a persecuted community” (22). Yet she is shocked that
“multiculturalists do not recognize anti-Semitism as a form of racism” (65). Struggling with these dual concerns, Spack recounts uncomfortable classroom experiences and admits that, although she has yet to find closure on this issue, her reflections have forced her to “challenge the notion that the best person to teach a work of literature is the person whose own experience is reflected in the text” (25). Ravina Aggarwal, an anthropologist who teaches courses on South-
Asia, echoes Spack’s concerns in narrating her experience of interacting with her American colleagues and students. In “Feminist Representation, Feminist Practice: Perspectives from South
Asian Anthropology,” she confesses to experiencing discomfort and frustration when faced with totalizing images of South-Asian culture: “Parenthetically, I find it very hard to teach South
Asian culture. I can teach about the world, but I find it very, very hard to teach about South
Asian culture.” After my experience, I could supplement these confessions with my own feelings of uneasiness. Spack’s anger, Aggarwal’s distress, and my experiences all point to the inadequacy of a critical pedagogy model for the ethnic teacher in the white-dominated classroom.
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What I neither anticipated nor prepared for was my sense of emotional accountability to my South-Asian identity which was wrested out of me during this mid-term presentation. I was struggling to make my students identify with the identity conflicts presented in the texts, but I had not made space for my recurring attachment to what constitutes as Indian experience. The slippages between my resistance to the role of “native informant” and the need to assert my sense of difference was an unexpected but important realization.
Facing up to these feelings of attachment is urgent and essential to any conversation about methods of teaching multicultural literature as a woman of color. This also raises new questions about the efficacy of critical pedagogy that insists on not playing the role of the expert, so as to emphasize that everyone has to learn something from the other, advocated in studies like
Multicultural Teaching in the University, edited by David Schoem et. al., and Beyond Comfort
Zones in Multiculturalism, edited by Sandra Jackson and Jose Solis. This gesture gets more complicated when the self-professed critical educator is simultaneously the (in-) authentic native informant.
Post-colonial theory had trained me to “unlearn privilege,” and critical pedagogy had taught me to “de-authorize” myself as the teacher and bearer of knowledge. But as a woman, and as a third-world minority scholar in a predominantly white department, I had also been persistently alienated and othered. I had always struggled to gain authority and respect as an academic intellectual and had often faced questions of credibility. The combined burden of these struggles and the persistent call of post-colonial and critical pedagogy theorists to de-authorize and de-essentialize made it impossible for me to speak for myself. Self-scrutiny and self- reflexivity intervened at every step, forcing me to undercut every statement that I made about myself with a counter claim.
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As a third-world immigrant I had marginal status, but at the same time I was conscious of my upper-class, upper caste, position. I carried the legacy of a colonial schooling, yet I strove in my courses to highlight the brutality of colonial rule. I advocated post-colonial studies, but was concerned that the overwhelming encouragement for post-colonial studies might lead to a domestication of the third-world experience. The role-playing students unmasked and exposed my need to express my subjectivity, even if it was privileged, upper-class, and upper-caste. This experience made me accept the principle that one cannot and should not undermine the need to emphasize one’s subjectivity. Although, as a critical intellectual, I aspired to dismiss all impulses of collective identity, this teaching experience made me aware of the importance of affirming ethnicity. As Ien Ang notes in “Identity Blues,” “No matter how convinced we are, theoretically, that identities are constructed not ‘natural’[sic], invented not given, always in process and not fixed, at the level of experience and common sense identities are generally expressed (and mobilized politically) precisely because they feel natural and essential” (20). Unless I had seen
Indianness staged and performed by my students during our mid-term assignments, I would not have discovered that, despite my exposure to identity politics, I myself had the tendency to museumize and commodify “Indianness.” In this case my students’ performance acted upon me to open up the conceptual category of what constitutes Indianness, and furthermore to reflect upon larger questions of identity. I agreed with Madeleine Grumet’s argument that “the personal is a performance, an appearance contrived for the public, and … these masks enable us to perform the play of pedagogy” (37). In the teaching experiences of these ten weeks, the mid-term teaching presentations provided the turning point, the moment when both my students and I dropped our masks. I was forced to discard the objective mask that I had initially adopted.
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To Teach Is To Unlearn
The responsibility of teaching allowed my students to immerse themselves in another culture. Coming face to face with altering did not make my students reduce the other to the same. Interestingly, they began to recognize differences; and more importantly, they began to take that difference seriously. Here are some extracts from their responses:
Ryan
Teaching the class about the story on Monday made me realize how tough it was to get
the point across to the students and make them care enough for the subject.
David
In this whole exercise of teaching I also found that for this particular class it is really hard
to teach and get feedback. No one wants to speak up and put for an opinion. Not many
people get involved with the dialogue of the class.
Jennifer:
To teach is to learn and to learn sometimes means you have to unlearn the ideas that have
been embedded in your mind since birth. Teaching a story made me read into the story
more and consider each possible implication (cultural, gendered) that the story and
characters carried. This made me realize that it’s difficult to teach, especially such
complex ideas.
The students’ experiences of teaching and my reactions both validate Caughie’s comment that “pedagogy might well be the site where performative theory comes to have public relevance” (92). The responsibility involved in teaching is what made the students read the texts with such seriousness. As Karen Kopleson notes in “Dis/Integrating the Gay/Queer Binary:
'Reconstructed Identity Politics' for a Performative Pedagogy”: “To occupy the position of
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teacher is to become, quite literally, a focal point in that room, even in the most antiauthoritarian or student-centered classroom; it is to be gazed upon, interpreted, anticipated, predicted, and
‘sized up’: it is to be speculated and gossiped about” (33). The act of teaching involves making sure how one will be read and received, yet the consequences are beyond the teacher’s control.
Yet, this same sense of accountability compelled my students to come up with easily recognizable (hence stereotypical) images of South-Asia. “There is a risk to performativity in pedagogy not often acknowledged,” notes Caughie, “and that is the risk of/in reception” (95).
Kopelson invoking Butler, explains that “A performative act can only work at all, in other words, to the extent that it is recognizable and it can be recognizable ‘to the extent that it draws on and covers the constitutive conventions by which it is mobilized’” (Butler “Burning” 205 qtd. in
Kopelson). The compulsion to reproduce something which is familiar made my students use exotic, commodified images of South-Asian women for their presentations; for me, the compulsion to create a sense of community in the classroom forced me to put on the mask of an incongruous, de-culturalized self. In both instances the result was an unreal, exaggerated spectacle. Teaching about identity conflicts, then, becomes one of the most effective ways of recognizing the constructedness of terms like South-Asian or American.
Another significant lesson that emerged out of the mid-term assignments was a practical demonstration of the limitations of the principle of de-centering. During the mid-term sessions, I often disrupted the presentation with questions and later felt embarrassed and apologized because
I thought it was uncharacteristic of typical student behavior. Initially, I believed that I had been inauthentic in mimicking the role of the student. But then I asked myself why I was categorizing myself as a failed student? Was it because I asked many questions, disagreed with many of the claims made by the student-presenters, and disrupted the smooth flow of the classroom? If yes,
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then this pointed to the stereotypical role of the student that was still embedded in my mind as passive, quiet, accepting and agreeing with whatever the teacher said. Bhabha says this about the mimetic performance with regards to colonialism: “In order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (“Of Mimicry and Men” 126).
Applying Bhabha’s principle to our situation, I see that my discomfort at being the active, questioning student exposed my inbuilt concept of the student as the passive recipient. Though my uneasiness with my outburst during the mid-term sessions was also because I insisted on possessing authentic knowledge about what constitutes an Indian experience, it was noteworthy that I (as the role-playing student) felt upset that I had over-stepped my role as student. But, unexpectedly, this activity also revealed some stereotypes embedded in me, their teacher. While
I was examining my unease at my failed role as a student, my role-playing teachers were busy classifying their roles as teachers and their teacherly experiences.
Kathy
Being the teachers allowed my group to question: What is freedom? What cultural
pressures do we have on our lives even though we live in a “free” society? Would I be
willing to take the same risks for love that Abha and Meena took? In my experience,
being the teacher makes me bring up more questions and less answers. I really learned a
lot and questioned a lot by teaching “The Affair” to my classmates.
Kristina
Since I had to present this story to the class, it forced me to pick this story apart to find
the meanings, and really think about the events that took place.
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Jeremy
I also noticed that when you are the teacher you have to analyze the story in more depth
as compared to just reading the story and answering a few questions.
These responses underscore how the students repeatedly associate asking questions and reading deeply, two strategies that one traditionally connects to students and learning, with teaching. I had expected my students to affiliate the role of teacher with the expert; instead, their characterization of the teacher and teaching was one of problem posing.
Their reflections on teaching gave a new dimension to the popular adage “the best way to learn something is to teach it.” Interestingly, they did not link this problem-posing role to their identities as students. My goal in asking them to write about their teaching experience was to find what they did differently to fit their concept of the teacher. Almost all my students admitted that being the “teacher” compelled them into reading deeply and asking questions, which made them “understand” the texts much better. The common perception of the role of the student in their responses was, “Being a student, I would just read and listen to the lectures.” While the students were quite aware and trained in methods of learning (reading deeply and asking many questions), they connected this stance with the task of the teacher. What was alarming was that even I too had felt "guilty" for asking “too many questions” when I was role-playing as the student.
This complex set of reactions forces us to consider that any talk of de-centering authority is futile unless teachers and students revise their preconceived concepts of teacher and student.
Particularly in a public university like the University of Cincinnati, the terms predetermined schooled selves that the students had slipped into without question. In a course that was already
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questioning the appropriateness of so many pre-fixed categories, perhaps this was the most important fixed identity that required questioning.
My initial goal of de-centering the classroom was to disturb my students’ sense of teacher authority and consider their reactions about being the authority of a text that dealt with the other.
I had expected that they might be prevented from entering into the text because of their race or gender. But, instead, I found that what was causing the bigger obstacle was the pre-fixed role of the passive student. Assigned to play the role of the teacher, they had donned the learning mantle, because they believed that as teachers they were accountable for what they said in class.
Of course I needed to keep in mind that they were performing as teachers because it was the requirement for an assignment, and this was no guarantee that this would be reciprocated in a different situation.
Prior to any discussion on negotiating authority in the classroom, it was important to first problematize our fixed concepts of teacher or student. In “Signs for Wonders” Bhabha points out in his discussion on colonial mimicry that “If mimicry, then, lays bare the assumptions that govern colonial relations, what it exposes most emphatically are the contradictions that underwrite colonial authority” (100). My students’ impersonation in their presentations exposed their fixed idea of how a teacher ought to behave. Recently while discussing the relationship of post-colonial theory to critical literacy Bhabha explains in an interview with Gary Olson, “how you negotiate depends very much on how you read the weight and sedimentation of that prior fixing or prefixing of power or authority or domination” (“Staging the Politics of Difference”
24). My idea of what students should do and how they should behave, as well as my students’ idea of how a teacher should conduct the class, were examples of an “arrested, fixated form of representation,” much like Bhabha’s definition of a colonial stereotype, “which connotes rigidity
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and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition” (24). My students’ notion of the responsibility of a teacher was preventing them from transferring that same accountability to their role as students.
Like their comments on playing teacher, their responses to the question “which character do you most identify with” proved equally intriguing. I shall focus on the responses from David and
Jennifer because their narratives in particular helped me view my students’ attitudes from a new perspective.
David:
Panna is the person that I can identify the most with. She left the world that she knew and
traveled from India to come to the States to earn a PhD I can somewhat relate to her
situation as she left the culture of her childhood and came to America where it is a
different culture and different expectations of the way that women and men act. The
reason I can relate to her experience is because I my self am not a native born Ohioan. I
come from a small town in Utah where everyone is religious to the point of
suffocation…. The rules where very strict on what one could eat, drink, read, music to
listen to, and for example what type of movies that one should watch if they wanted to
watch a movie. There were guidelines for everything that one might do in life…. When I
moved out here with my wife to Ohio and found that there wasn’t as great of a following
of my religion. At first I felt a little lost. I didn’t have anyone holding me to the
guidelines… I can see the confusion that she felt of living between two worlds. She had
the world of New York and American culture clashing with the world of Traditions that
she grew up with. I too am stuck between the world of my parent’s traditions and the
new one that I’m creating here in Ohio. I still keep in touch with my parents but they
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don’t know the inward change that I’ve made. They don’t understand why I don’t want
to move back to Utah and live near them…. It’s hard for me still to grasp everything
because I’m male and white and have all the advantages that come along with that, but
the things that I learned from this experience was [sic] to be more understanding, and
especially to accept and appreciate the rich and different culture that we are studying.
I was impressed that David associated his physical journey to Ohio with his intellectual and emotional growth. His comments provided me with an exceptionally useful strategy for future courses on immigrant texts. I had thoughtlessly disregarded the physical displacement that many of my students faced before they came to Cincinnati. Over and over again as I read through the students’ responses, I was struck by how insensitive and confined my concept of the mid-west
American student had been. In my attempt to disrupt the idea of authentic Indian from their minds, I had resorted to a different kind of homogenizing.
Jennifer’s response diverges into an account of her troubled personal life, but she concludes with some serious questions:
Jennifer:
In Bharati Mukherjee’s “Danny’s Girls” I most identified with the narrator. First and
foremost due to the fact that the narrator is unnamed. Maybe it’s as simple as he
represents all the people in America fighting to stay afloat in the jungle. I don’t know
the significance of the narrator not being named but it has caught my attention.
Sometimes I feel like no one in the big scheme of things, like I blend in with all of
the other faces without names…. But my family was not so traditional that they didn’t
prepare me for all of the changes and feelings that were to come as a teenager, nor
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did my Catholic school, nor the conservative community…. My ex-boyfriend, the father
of my child, was like Rosie.
He took advantage of my feelings and innocence…. What defines true culture?
Westerners do because they/we put definitions or characteristics on everything especially
something “other” than us. And we have created a distorted view of what’s Indian. We
don’t even really know what makes someone American. It’s more complex than he/she
should be like this, look like that, and speak this way/language.
Reading about this experience made me appreciate why Jennifer had always identified and sympathized with Maya’s self-absorption but always undermined Gita’s introspection. Gita, though traumatized and conflicted, does find some balance and, more importantly, personal happiness with Firoze. In plain words, her life story has a happy ending. But Maya does come across as more of a fighter and crusader; she is at odds with the world. Even as she asks questions, Jennifer is pushing herself to find answers. It was gratifying to know that reading these texts had convinced her to reflect and question her assumptions. The experience of reading and teaching these immigrant narratives had provided Jennifer with a strategic lens which made her realize her complicity in relations of domination and subjection.
Jennifer and David’s personal accounts convinced me of the need to revise my idea of post-coloniality. Rather than privilege one culture over the other, or configure difference as a deviance, Jennifer and David’s responses reflect Peter McLaren’s vision of a post-colonial classroom. In an interview McLaren insists that a post-colonial pedagogy must associate with all kinds of imperialisms. For McLaren, “the notion of post-colonialism … challenges global transnational capitalism as a kind of Euro-American success story … and specifically challenges
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the way that Anglo-European discourses have split off the ‘other,’ and have banished and romanticized difference in a politically and ethically disabling manner” (230).
As I look back upon this experience, the mid-term teaching episode emerges as the turning point for the class. It was during this assignment that I was forced to abandon my mask of objectivity. From this point forward I was more comfortable with identifying myself as a
South-Asian and in giving voice to my experiences as a minority in the Western context. Both roles--the teacher and the South-Asian woman--had performativity embedded into them.
Doubtless, the impetus for this course was to analyze how my students would react to the multicultural text and the minority teacher. But I had not grasped that I, too, was the subject of scrutiny. I had naively believed that I could temper down my Indianness (as if it was a spice) and cleverly counteract my students’ expectations, as though I might trick them into revealing their stereotypes about minorities. My strategy had been carefully rehearsed, and my mask was carefully crafted and in place. I was determined not to give my students exotic stories, which would allow them to exclaim, “Thank goodness I’m American.” Thus I adopted an exaggerated, overly objectivist stance, hoping that this grant me some degree of safety. After these mid-term sessions, I revised my staunchly held stance and agreed to go along with Ien Ang’s confession:
“If I am inescapably Chinese [Indian] by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese [Indian] by consent. When and how is a matter of politics”(18).
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Chapter Six: Taking Multiculturalism Personally: Teaching The Shadow Lines
In the teaching experience of those ten weeks, the mid-term teaching presentations proved the turning point, the moment when both my students and I dropped our masks. I was forced to discard the objective mask that I had initially adopted, and my students had confessed in their responses to the teaching episode about how challenging and difficult it was to make the other students “care” about cultural otherness. David notes: “In this whole exercise of teaching I also found that for this particular class it is really hard to teach and get feed back. No one wants to speak up and put forth an opinion. Not many people get involved with the dialogue of the class.”
After the mid-term I had accepted that it was risky and even impossible to completely erase my subjectivity in class. It was essential to unlearn privilege in the classroom, but that did not necessitate de-culturalizing oneself. The assignment yielded some unexpected consequences which reemphasized the need to be flexible in setting up course plans and objectives. Although my discussion of post-colonial concepts had proved ineffective in making my students recognize the complex intersections between politics and cultural traditions, the teaching experience had made my students grasp the politics of knowing and communicating knowledge. Dao’s reflection on her teaching experience provided me with a useful framework that I planned to use for future courses:
As a reader, one has a tendency to be a critic within their own perspective. It may be
difficult for some readers to understand the cultural clash and splitting of selves when
they have only been raised within the confinements of one culture. The majority of
people in the U.S do not have the responsibility of balancing their cultural traditions and
assimilating to a new culture. They already live within their culture, where mostly
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everyone behaves, dresses, talks and looks similar to them. It is difficult for this majority
group to understand the identity conflicts an Indo-American woman faces. As a teacher
providing insight into this Indo-American female perspective, it was necessary to try
many different techniques… Thus, I learned that in order to teach someone about another
culture and the process of defining one’s personal and cultural identity, it is important to
realize that the learning process is different for each person and a variety of techniques
must be utilized in order to facilitate the teaching and learning.
Having lived through the experience of constantly juggling between identities and cultures from childhood had made Dao keenly sensitive to some aspects of dealing with cultural difference that
I did not realize. My frustration of these past few years was articulated expertly by her: “As a minority, I have experienced both direct and subtle discrimination towards minority groups. I am rather proactive and will generally let others know my discomfort. However, I have retreated to suppressing the anger and frustrations at times because of the lack of support around me or the need to seem refined and proper.” The two reasons provided by Dao point to the crux of the matter. I found that I was much more comfortable with talking about my Indianness now that I had discarded the mask of seeming “refined and proper,” as Dao expertly puts it. For the rest of the quarter, I tried to build on the successes that this assignment had unexpectedly generated.
Thus instead of resuming my place as the teacher, I decided to build upon the collaborative spirit that had been built up after the mid-term presentations. For example, instead of staying with my previous course plan of prescribing 150 pages of reading per week, I instead consulted them about how we should tackle Ghosh. After some discussion we decided to suspend our classes for a week so that the students would have enough time to read it.
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In this exquisitely crafted novel Ghosh combines history, political events, and personal tragedy to give his reader an experience of what it is to inhabit “Indianness.” Using a complex, looping and non-linear narrative technique that constantly conflates past and present, political and personal memory, Ghosh narrates the relationship between India and her diaspora: “The links are not those of language, religion, politics or economics. In a sense the links are those of culture in which the most important cultural institutions as we usually understand them- for example, language and religion – are absent…the links…are lived within the imagination” (247-
248). The recurring leit-motif of this novel is, “Don’t you remember?” (12). In his critical essay on the novel, Suvir Kaul describes the novel’s trajectory as one which “traces the political, social, intellectual and emotional parameters of an English-speaking, bi-lingual, metropolitan, middle-class Indian subjectivity” (126). The Shadow Lines encompasses multiple narratives, and one of the most difficult decisions when you teach this text is to choose which aspect you want to focus on without compromising the overall effect of the novel.
Ghosh’s central theme of shadows represents the blurry borders between countries (in this case India and Bangladesh) as well as our own shadowy selves which change shape based on our distortions of ourselves. The character portrayals are enigmatic and shadowy, at once both tangible and intangible, pointing to how we distort our realities for ourselves and others, even as we construct images of how we would like to be seen.
For example, the central protagonist who is also narrator of the novel remains unnamed.
It is quite evident that he is infatuated with his first-cousin Ila, and yet, the narrator does not confess to this truth until eighteen years later. A mystique and mystery surrounds Tridib, the narrator’s uncle and role-model: “Nobody was ever quite sure where they stood with Tridib: there was a casual self-mockery about many of the things he said which left his listeners
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uncertain about whether they ought to take what he said at face value or believe its opposite”
(10). Much like Tridib, Ghosh intersperses the present with past, London with Calcutta, so effortlessly that it sometimes shocks the readers to realize that they have actually crossed continents in-between two sentences. This deliberate attempt at dislocation is a recurring feature with many of Ghosh’s novels. Born in India, Ghosh himself has lived in many places like
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, England, and Burma. In a BBC interview with Harriet Gilbert, Ghosh explains the constant movement and dislocation in all his novels as a deliberate technique that goes against the grand novelistic tradition of privileging place: “The thing about the novel is that it has always been associated with a sense of place and I think that this is one of the great weaknesses of the novel … to my mind there has always been an untruth in the way that novels were written, that they didn't correspond to the way that lives are led.”
This experience of travel, as we have learnt from Mukherjee and Naraynan, provides people with an opportunity to radicalize their lives, but the choices are not so clearly defined for all those who make the passage. Often, cultural histories and differences collide with personal expectations, turning these opportunities into upheavals. Maya Sanyal, Gita Das, Tridib, and now even Jennifer and David have articulated how movement between places renders us lost and helpless.
To deal with distortion and reality was particularly ironic for me because the last two weeks had afforded me an uncomfortable yet enlightening image of my so-called anti-essentialist impulses. This novel tells the readers that the way we view ourselves is not always the way that others view us, and until we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, we will always remain in the shadows of our own enlightenment. Yet this constructed/distorted sense of self is equally significant because it is based on our perception of the “truth.” Ghosh appears to pose the
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question, what constitutes reality if not our perceptions of it? The parallel and mirror scenes interspersed with personal anecdotes (which in turn reflect socio-historical realities of a middle- class Bangla, Bhadralok family as it ascends the social spectrum) are minutely documented. For this text in particular, focusing on the literariness enhances rather than detracts from its politics.
But since so far I had purposefully withdrawn from talking about form and structure in order to underscore the internal conflicts of the characters, it would be tough to focus exclusively on form instead of content.
Mita Bose contends that Ghosh’s narrative technique of juggling the chronological order and detailing only the events of forty-one days (even though the time span of the novel is 1939-
1979) enables “ the development of two or more lines of action occurring at widely removed points of time and space, side by side, each exuding its own flow and suspense” (177-178). This technique is central to the novel’s theme of crisscrossing shadow lines because it suggests that by
“using memory as fictional convention or narrative principle … the past can be concurrent with the present and geographical distances can be transcended” (179). Thus highlighting the literariness of The Shadow Lines by focusing on the narrative principle was not only a useful but a preferred way of reading it.
I was relieved that my students candidly discussed their frustration with the complex sequence of events in the novel, and to assist them, I sketched out a rudimentary flow-chart juxtaposing the historical chronology of events in time with the non-linear method used in the novel. I hoped this would give me an opportunity to highlight Ghosh’s literary skills as a novelist. But my students were completely uninterested in the formalistic aspects and insisted on treating the text as social document, taking sides on topics like Ila’s divorce from Nick Price, and arguing about why none of the romantic involvements in The Shadow Lines ever translates into a
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sexual experience. This was largely because I had decided not to focus on the texts as creative pieces because I believed that this would inspire my students to engage with the issues involved.
Such a strategy enhances student involvement, but ends up making the texts serve as social documents. Thus, rather than insist on the formal qualities of the text, I decided to address other concerns raised by the novel.
In keeping up with the major theme of our course, I had planned to focus on Ila and
Tha’mma (paternal grandmother in Bengali). I had deliberately chosen to teach The Shadow
Lines as the third text because, unlike Maya and Gita, Ila’s sense of home and place is not so fixed. I wanted our class discussions to consider if not having a sense of home or belonging made Ila’s choices easier, and gender expectations less stringent. Ila, quite the globetrotter, is schooled in London and Sri Lanka, interspersed with holidays in Calcutta. Despite being brought up in the lap of luxury, Ila affiliates and lives with her group of Communist friends who regard her as “our own upper-class Asian Marxist” (97). As comfortable in a sari as in tight, black, leather pants, sophisticated, passionate Ila is a fascinating figure who spends her spare time going to demonstrations and “acting in radical plays for Indian immigrants” (79). I expected my students to identify most with Ila since she was more western than any of the characters that we had so far encountered.
In the novel Ghosh articulates the central predicament of the post-colonial psyche as the need to free oneself of other people’s inventions. The Shadow Lines complicates the phrase “to invent a self.” Rather than simply connote deceit and dishonesty, this gesture of invention warrants us to ask, who is doing the inventing, and for what end?
While the pub filled with young bankers…, I tried to tell Ila and Robi about the
archeological Tridib…the Tridib who had pushed me to imagine the roofs of Colombo
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for myself, the Tridib who had said that we could not see without inventing what we saw,
so at least we could try to do it properly. And then, because she shrugged dismissively
and said: Why? Why should we try, why not just take the world as it is? I told her how he
said that we had to try because the alternative wasn’t blankness- it only meant that if we
didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions.
But I am free, she said laughing. (31)
But is Ila free? Despite the fact the she has traveled and crossed borders, Ila above all other characters in the novel is locked into other people’s inventions about her. As Suvir Kaul points out, “In this novel women, Ila in particular … are represented as carrying the greatest burden of historical dislocation, and it is their ‘missteps’ that lead to personal tragedy… For them there are no transformations of cultural frontiers, only inelegant transgressions” (143). Ila is never given the choice to exchange selves. Only an illusion of transformation is allowed to her through the stories that she invents about herself. Tha’mma, herself a fiercely independent, self-made woman is ruthlessly critical of her granddaughter Ila, calling her “a greedy, little slut” (78) and criticizing Ila’s decision to live in England: “ ‘Ila has no right to live there’ she said hoarsely.
She doesn’t belong there…she’s gone there for the money” (77-79). Robi, her elder brother, is patronizing and overly protective about her, and condemns her uninhibited behavior at the club, saying, “Listen, Ila … You shouldn’t have done what you did. You ought to know that; girls don’t behave like that here” (88). Robi’s words are a poignant example of the schooled, well- brought up behavior that upper-class, South-Asian women are taught to follow and cultivate. It is this collective burden which Ila is supposed “to know” (88) instinctively, that she and South-
Asian women seek to escape. In Kaul’s words: “As we have learnt to expect from the place of women in colonial and post-colonial Indian society, the weight of sexual and cultural definition
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is borne unequally by men and women, with men as the putative agent of socio-cultural transformations and women as its, more or less, traumatized subjects” (285).
Ultimately, Ila ends up choosing a life which is doomed for failure. The last glimpse of
Ila that the novel affords is a helpless, angry Ila who is aware of her tragic fate, but who does not wish to fight back: “Could I have ever imagined, she said, that I, Ila Datta-Chaudhari, free woman and free spirit, would ever live in that state of squalor where incidents in one’s life can be foretold like teasers for a bad television serial? I suppose not but there you are” (187). What are the reasons for Ila’s failure? Despite being granted the experience of travel and freedom of movement, why cannot Ila be free “of the bloody culture” (89)? Why didn’t she, like Maya
Sanyal and Gita Das, learn to accommodate her sense of freedom along with her need to maintain a cultural identity? I hoped that my students would put forth these questions in our class discussions.
Many of my students believed that Ila too was spoilt and clueless about what she wanted in life. Ashley notes: “A postcolonial woman must choose the values from each culture that are most important to her, but doing so leaves her somewhat alienated from both societies. It is almost as though these women exist in a category all their own.” She believes that these women know what is most important to them, but as the struggles of Maya, Gita and even Ila exemplify, it is increasingly difficult to realize what is important to oneself because individual self-interest is not cultivated in South-Asian cultures. Ashley assumes that, being a typical American, she
“knows” what she wants: “My friends often complain that I ask for their opinions, but then do what I want without regard to their opinions. I value their opinions, but I live my own life, and in the end I rely on my own intuition.” I had hoped that reading these conflicts would make Ashley grasp that what she defined as her “choice” as a liberated “American woman” was also built up
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and constructed to fit societal demands and norms. Maya values her independence, but cannot resist the temptation of looking for Indian/Bengali names in the phone book. Similarly Gita appears seemingly sobered after her stormy relationship with Norvin, yet cannot help but slide into almost accepting chauvinist Ajay because it gives her such comfort and solace to talk about some common topics. My own experience at the mid-term highlighted my eagerness to identify and authenticate my Indian ethnicity. Maya, Gita, and Ila did have the courage to seek independence, and they do almost exist in a world of their own, but that did not diminish their desire to belong to a cultural collectivity. Their ethnicity is a vital aspect of their identity and is not something they can discard because of their new found independence. As Nira Yuval Davis explains in her essay, “Identity Politics and Women’s Ethnicity”:
There is a certain paradox with respect to women’s empowerment especially when
women are members of minority or non-Western collectivities. Often, the particular
culture they would like to assert vis-à-vis the hegemonic culture includes also elements
which they feel subordinate them as women and which they would like to resist and
transform within their own community. (414)
According to Davis, in a foreign land, women become symbolic of “home,” which translates into a site for all that one associates with belonging: customs, conventions, food, language, culture, and traditional values. Yet, in being true to this cultural memory, women also adhere to patriarchal conventions and become willing participants in their continued oppression.
From their responses it was evident that my students had shifted from judging these characters from a privileged stance and had broken away from the stance of superiority. In his response to a question about why the female characters in these texts find it difficult to juggle and negotiate their different selves, David used Ila as an example: “She wanted everyone to like
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her and accept her, but she was too different from everyone else…It is hard to choose between the two different images of self- identity…She has to continually struggle with herself about how to act. She can’t be Indian enough in India, yet she is too Indian for England.” In another response, David confessed, “Besides, if you look at it, ‘Americans’ are strange themselves.”
Intriguingly, David’s comments about Ila echo Jennifer’s life story which she narrated as part of her response. In fact, Ila’s tone of powerlessness and her anxiety at being trapped in roles and images resonate with Jennifer’s comments on the stereotypes of American women. This was in response to an assignment which asked them to discuss the unfair stereotyping of American women in Mukherjee’s short stories and Naraynan’s novel. In their mid-term presentations they had pointed this out, adding that American media too used this same stereotype of American women. In my prompt I specifically asked if they all accepted that the media was promoting unfair images of women. Many in their responses accepted the ill effects and damage of the media stereotypes of American women. Jennifer writes:
Stereotypical representations of American women in the media, magazines, and on
picture screens harm women and society. American women are ‘known’, and I say
known because this seems the biggest stereotype, to be easy. According to The American
Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.) easy means 1. Capable of being accomplished without
difficulty. 2. Free from worry, anxiety, trouble, or pain. 3. Causing little hardship or
distress… Basically saying American women will do anything or anyone. American
women Don’t care. And that would have to mean that we ultimately don’t care about
ourselves. And that perception hurts. Maybe that explains why some people don’t smile
back. Basically the possibility disappears of having individual identities. The
provocative pose probably suggests that we are sexual. And most times the clothing is
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tight and may accentuate certain parts of the body. This combination transmits a sexual
identity that is careless, hopeless, and open. Kind of like we cannot do anything else.
Just sit there and look pretty. All of this has a negative impact on how we all treat each
other…. We judge people on how they look and what they’re wearing. Not actually
seeing beyond the façade…. Even though Bharati Mukherjee likes to illustrate the
American women in a stereotypical way, so does America. Maybe other countries
may have religious or traditional reasons that can stir them towards shunning any
of that activity. America reinforces these stereotypes in fashion, media, language, and
life.
Jennifer’s frustration highlights that these texts had privileged race, but disregarded gender in their portrayal of American women. All the American women in these texts repeated the stock images of American women, perhaps because the writers wanted to bring out the contrast between them and the South-Asian women in these texts. But my students had been sensitive readers, and these images had disturbed them. This was admirable and impressive because my students showed that they were not submitting to the authority of the text but regarded reading as a dialectical process of understanding, criticizing, and challenging the text.
Jennifer’s comments can be contextualized in the perspective of a larger, current debate in feminist studies about the imperialism embedded in feminist theories, and the effectiveness of emphasizing difference. In “‘Race’, Gender and the Concept of ‘Difference,’” Mary Maynard discusses the usefulness and problems of emphasizing cultural difference with regards to gender.
Maynard suggests that one way to rethink difference is to problematize the label white: “It is as important to look at the taken-for-granted everydayness of white privilege, as well as circumstances in which it is more directly expressed” (131). For Jennifer the term American
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woman is burdensome because it historically represents power and privilege, but as her experience shows, this assumption denies the daily oppression experienced by many women.
Moreover, treating white as a homogenous category ends up offering neither political nor intellectual support for women like Jennifer to confront gender oppression. Jennifer’s concluding words almost communicate a sense of envy for women like Maya and Gita because they emerge from cultures where they have the support systems to help them confront oppression. Constructs like feminist and western woman assume a certain degree of empowerment and agency which needs to be constantly interrogated. Jennifer’s comments echo Ila’s anxiety and sense of feeling trapped. Her words communicate that, whether constructed as sexually liberal/ western or submissive/traditional, women are still positioned as objects to be gazed upon, and the feeling of being oppressed seems to be inescapable.
Jennifer helped me recognize how to discuss the issue of difference in relation to gender issues in the future. If I privileged cultural difference, there was a risk of ignoring women like
Jennifer and the oppressive experiences that they face, despite belonging to the powerful group of white women. Ashley’s response acknowledged the differences in both American and South-
Asian oppressions, but ends up situating them on the same plane. This approach too is dangerous because “[all] forms of diversity are lumped together as examples of difference, implying that they are similar phenomena with similar explanations” (Maynard 129).
From the start I had used the texts to build an appreciation and understanding of what
South-Asian immigrant women go through as they interact with the majority culture, and how these experiences intersect with and oftentimes contradict their cultural values. My approach was based on resisting the homogeneity of assimilation as well as highlighting the importance of articulating difference. To put it simply, I was privileging and celebrating cultural difference as
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opposed to the homogeneity of the dominant culture in America. Thus, inadvertently, I was projecting a polarized attitude. Since I was extremely conscious of not behaving like the native informant or representative, I tried not to speak for “us,” but positioned the South-Asian texts to represent South-Asian women. As the previous chapters have revealed, this stance did not work as I had expected; instead it resulted in opening up new questions of subjectivity in the classroom. I felt that my conflicts as a South-Asian were being underrated, and I resisted this gesture by overemphasizing my difference to the point of privileging experience as knowledge.
But my students’ comments about their own border crossings and gender discrimination made me rethink my concept of the marginal. In his essay titled “Taking Multiculturalism Personally,”
Gregory Jay discusses another kind of multiculturalism called oppositional multiculturalism, which is less interested in celebrating difference than in resisting oppression. (117) Rather than accept the borders between different cultural groups, this approach to multiculturalism questions and analyzes how cultural borders come to be defined in the first place. What emerges from this other approach to multiculturalism is the question, is the definition of border or cultures a question of personal or collective identity? For example, as a South-Asian woman I always identify myself as a woman and then as an Indian or South-Asian. The protagonists of the texts we read like Gita, Maya, Shaila, and Ila had proved how difficult it was to decide which identity to prioritize, personal (woman) or collective? I was curious to see whether my students had begun to think differently about Americanness after reading these texts. Did reading about immigrant and minority cultures make them more aware of the diversity of America? To make certain that they would not elide the race issue, I framed the prompt to include the African-
American presence:
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If it is assumed that the majority of America has a similar culture, what might be some
ways to define that culture? Often when I walk down the street, I encounter African
American youths wearing overflowing T-shirts, baggy pants, sporting various kinds of
jewelry, and mouthing rap songs. This, I am told is “black culture.” Do you think this is
the same as “American culture”? If you believe that there are different “cultures” in
America, can you name some of them and state if you identify with one culture more than
the other? Have you ever faced a cultural “conflict” if you identity with more than one
culture?
Ashley
The largest culture that I belong to is the global culture. People in countries around the
world can buy the same brands that I buy (Nike, Coke, Levis, and Nestle), can watch the
same or similar movies and television shows that I watch, and can access the same
internet sites or travel to the same places.
David
I belong to the white-American culture, Western US culture, Cowboy culture, German-
American culture, student culture, intellectual culture, studious culture, suburban culture,
inner city driving/traffic culture, high paced-- always in a hurry culture, Married culture.
These cultures can be defined as everything that I as a person am involved in. For
instance, White-American culture encompasses Sports such as football (my favorite
sport) all the way to food such as steak and potatoes, although personally my favorite
food is Mexican, which in it’s self can be considered American culture because America
takes different parts of other cultures and remakes it as it’s own.
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For both Ashley and David their identity as Americans was conceived in terms of one that is naturally given, even though they use commodities or brand names to define it. Their comments underscore that dominant American culture has become commodified to such an extent that the difference between marketing and culture has collapsed. Strangely, in a culture where individualism is so prized, everything has become so commercialized that autonomous identities echo marketed images.
Dao:
With ease, I can pick up a pair of chopsticks as I could a fork or spoon. Simultaneously,
I’m translating the lyrics of popular Vietnamese songs to English in my mind. I walk into
my house speaking Vietnamese and walk out speaking English. Each day in my life is an
intricate balance between two ethnic cultures, Vietnam and America…. Culture is quite a
complex concept that goes beyond one’s ethnicity, religion or class. For example, two
people with a similar ancestry can not necessarily be lumped into one common culture. I
may have much more in common with an African American living in Cincinnati, Ohio
attending college, than I do with a Vietnamese girl working on a fish farm in Vietnam.
Jennifer:
I’d like to say that I belong to the American culture but if you ask me to define exactly
what that means I’d have no idea where to begin. I don’t want to categorize but…. And
at the same time maybe my need to categorize or identify is due to me being raised in the
USA my entire life. And as you know we are the country infatuated with identity and
what category do you best fall under, not what category accurately fits you. I regress….
Let’s say that there is White culture, Black culture, Hispanic culture, Native-Indian
culture, Indian culture…. I was born and raised in the white culture. I attended a Catholic
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private school my entire life…. I was taught by all white teachers. The texts that I was
taught from were written/published by whites. And television, media, and the radio was
predominantly white. So white was everywhere…. I wasn’t always treated nicely by
other kids, mostly white kids. Either way they were cruel. I saw myself relating to the
black kids more and more. Looking back, blacks took the back seat on several occasions,
like myself…. Teachers even treated the not so attractive differently than the good-
looking kids…. But my idea of culture is that it’s socially constructed from generation to
generation…. And I think that the dominating/popular culture is just a result of the many
conforming or shall I say “eating” it, consuming it. So we’re back to what is culture?
In contrast to the other students, both Dao and Jennifer express an identity which they have arrived at after acknowledging and making sense of their individual experiences, including their conscious and unconscious understandings. Their definitions suggest an individual presence without an essence. They acknowledge the numerous layers that simultaneously overlap and unfold us. Most importantly, they recognize the politics and history that surrounds their individual identity, and how their specific location creates opportunities for them. Jennifer in particular demonstrates an ability to make negotiations and alliances with other cultural groups.
At the same time, Dao shows remarkable insight by recognizing the politics of location as she realizes the difference between her experiences and that of a girl working at a fish farm in
Vietnam, even though they both are Vietnamese women. Though even Jennifer and Dao do not underline a personal essence which is exclusive, they are aware that their idea of culture is socially constructed by different institutions like race and class. Jennifer’s words demonstrate a struggle and negotiation with other cultures, like African-American, yet the conflict does not necessarily lead into coherence. For both Dao and Jennifer, cultural identity is personal. For
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them, as for Maya, Gita, and myself, identity is a combination of a personal, idiosyncratic self and a collective cultural self. Dao and Jennifer also demonstrate a struggle with what Gregory
Jay describes as American individualism-“freeing oneself of cultural peculiarities … to become a normal prosperous American” (122). But they cannot adopt this completely because their daily experiences of negotiating between a sense of being and belonging to a group has made them question the homogeneity of cultural labels.
My students’ narratives, the conflicts in the literary texts, as well as my own unexpected experiences during the teaching of this course, pointed to the fluidity involved in defining identity. Yet, my experiences in the classroom had also highlighted the necessity to affiliate with a collective group. It was evident from my students’ comments that reading about explorations of otherness and cultural conflicts in these texts had made them achieve a sense of their own strangeness and otherness. In the words of Gregory Jay, “they had taken multiculturalism personally” (117).
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Chapter Seven: The Elitism of the Questioning Subject: Teaching Meatless Days
Our last reading for this course was “Excellent Things in Women,” the first chapter from
Suleri’s memoir Meatless Days, vastly different from any text that we had read so far. While
Mukherjee, Naraynan, and Ghosh explored the complex factors that make up our sense of self, whether invented or real, Suleri’s memoir, which narrates her early life in Pakistan, questions the centrality of the concept of identity itself. She is suspicious of the very language and terms used to denote and articulate third world subjectivity, raising the fundamental question: in a world where all definitions of women and femininity are given by the male, how should a woman position herself? I anticipated that Suleri would help to further complicate the idea that, for a South-Asian woman, family and traditional roles become vehicles to further patriarchal oppression, and yet domesticity also offers the comfort, solace, and a quiet resistance with which one can negotiate that oppression.
Meatless Days defies conventional rules of form and content, and this highly personal, reflexive, and intimate account launches the politics of representation into an entirely new realm. As a professor at an Ivy League university, Suleri has personally faced the predicament of being positioned as the third world scholar in the western academy. “Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women” (1). The opening sentence introduces the many contrasting threads that build up the narrative. Political events relating to the history of Pakistan are yoked together with seemingly mundane domestic occurrences; an example is the comparison of the numerous Presidents of the country to the reign of various cooks in the Suleri household. In her critical commentary on Meatless Days, Sangeeta Ray offers an explanation for Suleri’s strategy:
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The macropolitics …is grotesquely thrust into the realm of the domestic which
simultaneously enables Suleri to invalidate political history as the governing discourse
that reconfigures a regional and international landscape, and to emphasize the blinding
clash generated by the synchronicity of hitherto disparate and heterogeneous events. (51)
The ever-changing political scene of Pakistan serves as a useful background to understand the multiple nuances in this text. Sohail Inayatullah’s “Mullahs, Sex, and Bureaucrats: Pakistan’s
Confrontation with the Modern World” offers some socio-historical background in a country where the two available choices are resorting to a lifestyle of Westernization or retaining a feudal/traditional outlook. Inayatullah’s essay narrates the various political events that led to the militarization and subsequently the Islamization of Pakistan under the rule of President Zia-ul-
Haq. He writes: “Plurality is destroyed as the definition of ‘Muslim’ becomes more and more restrictive” (122). Inayatullah informs that an Islam built on social control, in particular policing of woman’s behavior, pervades Pakistan:
In Europe the search for purity comes out in the oppression of color; in Pakistan it comes
out in the oppression of sexual behavior, since color is transparent…. Gender relations
continue to define all cosmologies, as do human nature and human other. But in Pakistan
where the streets are full of only men; men leer at any woman who can walk; members of
the religious class use every legal effort to legitimize, rationalize, and legalize their deep
fear of and distaste of women. (126-128)
The complex nature of sexual relations is a topic that can be easily misconstrued in a classroom. I was concerned that my students might use derogatory adjectives like uncivilized and barbaric when discussing life in Pakistan, particularly in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Such fears confounded me, but my main concern was how to teach a narrative which
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emerges from a culture known for following open discrimination towards women. This question also preoccupies Suleri too. Exasperated with negotiating the multiple internal contradictions and resisting western conceptualizations of the other, she confesses: “I’ve lived many years as an otherness machine, had more than my share of being other” (105). While I had always been fascinated by Suleri’s tactics of complicating constructs like woman and third-world, the full impact of Suleri’s frustration and consequent dismissal of westernized notions only became a reality in the context of teaching this class.
As I reflected on these past few weeks, I realized that I had made it my principal role to behave like an “otherness machine.” Initially I had resisted the role of the native informant, yet as the course proceeded, I had appropriated my position as bearer of authentic knowledge and narrated incidents from my childhood in India. Cheryl Johnson, an African-American teacher who teaches African-American literature to predominantly white students, takes a different approach. In “Disinfecting Dialogues” Johnson explains why she refuses to engage in the personal in the classroom, admitting that she is a “trickster” (129). She believes that the time is not yet ripe to allow her students “an intimate, engaging cultural ‘immersion’ into the smells, textures, and rhythms of African American culture through its literature” (129). Instead, Johnson declares, “[This] is not a story to pass on” (129, author’s brackets). Suleri echoes Johnson’s position. Years of being gazed upon as the authentic other and many attempts at playing the role of the third world minority have taken their toll on Suleri. Thus, when asked to teach a course on third-world literature by her department at Yale, Suleri chooses to not include any text by a female author. Puzzled by this choice of texts, a student questions her selection of texts:
When I teach topics in third world literature, much time is lost in trying to explain that
the third world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience. Trying to find it is like
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pretending that history or home is real and located precisely where you’re sitting. I hear
my voice quite idiotically say. And then it happens. A face, puzzled and attentive and
belonging to my gender, raises its intelligence to question, why, since I am teaching third
world writing, I haven’t given equal space to women writers on my syllabus. I look up,
the horse’s mouth, a foolish thing to be. Unequal images battle in my mind for
precedence -- there’s imperial Ifat, there’s Mamma in the garden, and Halima the
cleaning woman is there too, there’s uncanny Dadi with her goat. Against all my odds I
know what I must say. Because, I’ll answer slowly, there are no women in the third
world. (20)
Literary critics have offered various explanations for Suleri’s words. For example, Samir Dayal notes that “She luxuriates in secreting the self into indeterminacy, and into a figure of speech- into language-even as she appears to reveal it in the homely detail. Suleri flourishes her studied rhetoric as if to mock guileless self-disclosure” (253).
Women in Suleri’s world gain strength through derisive denial. As Suleri mockingly notes: “once in a while, we naturally thought of ourselves as women, but only in some perfunctory biological way that we happened on perchance. Or else it was a hugely practical joke, we thought, hidden somewhere among our clothes” (1). What if, Suleri suggests, we women don’t think of ourselves as women in the first place? Men oppress by imposing rules on our physical bodies. But what if we think of ourselves as meatless? By this dramatic supposition
Suleri undercuts any self-congratulatory gesture that the men of Pakistan might grant themselves for fulfilling the cause of Islam by imposing control on women.
One might well ask, isn’t Suleri taking an insurmountable risk by adopting such a stance?
After all, according to the text, Suleri is here answering a question as a teacher, and is it
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advisable to enhance the ambiguity if a student asks for a clarification? Spivak’s comments on strategic essentialism, discussed at an interview with Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, offer an intriguing twist to Suleri’s tactic: “Within the U.S. context, if you really want to affirm your identity, you would have to undo the system totally…. If you want to undo the curriculum, be aware of the limits of your power rather than dramatize yourself. Gesture politics comes without the critical moment built into it” (43).
I had already grasped the truth of Spivak’s warning because these past few weeks had made me aware of the limitations of gesture politics. Often I wondered whether, faced with a similar question in the context of this class, I might respond with an equally shocking retort.
After all I had been repeatedly telling my students that all the texts we read were elitist and not representative of India, or Indianness. If a student did question my choice of texts and asked why
I had not included texts from a middle or lower class perspective, or, if caste was such a big issue, why had I not included texts that also engaged with the problems of caste discrimination, would answering like Suleri be acceptable? The daunting task of how I would discuss this sophisticated stance in the classroom had bothered me from the first day of teaching. After their first reading, most of my students were bewildered by Suleri’s narrative. I pressed upon them to think of some possible reasons for Suleri’s decision to leave out women writers. At first, their responses were, “Maybe there weren’t any women writers at that time” and “Maybe all the women that mattered in her life died so she feels there are no women.” However, some students who were also single mothers were angry with Suleri for treating women so insignificantly, and thus, unwilling to accept such simplistic explanations. They felt cheated. Interestingly, this dissatisfaction generated a class discussion about using Americanisms that resembled Suleri’s tactic.
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Discussion on Meatless Days
Jennifer: Isn’t Suleri in a way promoting the stereotype?
Emily: I think maybe she wants to tell us something different.
Ashley: Why didn’t she ask that student, “What is a woman”?
Patrick: Well the only explanation I could think of was that these women did not answer or match to what we think are women.
Me: Remember in the assignment about choosing films to represent America, all of you included the statement that the American spirit cannot be really represented. You have to come and live here and so on. Now, one behavioral trait that has always interested me is the American use of quotation marks. I mean, I see it in on TV, in speeches, in discussions with my friends. Even in casual conversation people keep enacting quotation marks with their fingers even as they talk.
(Hand gesture of quotation marks). What exactly do these marks mean?
Jennifer: Well, yes we often overuse them. It means this is not the real meaning. I mean…it is hard to explain.
Me: Well, does inserting quotation marks mean that there is a popular meaning of this word, and
I don’t mean that, but I don’t also want to state what I really?
Jennifer (Laughs): yes, exactly.
Me: Well, look at Suleri’s statement, “There are no women in the third world” with these quotation marks: “There are no ‘women’ in the ‘third world’. Does it change anything?
This conversation shows that, although it was extremely challenging, as a class we managed to arrive at some explanations for Suleri’s strategy. But more importantly I was not exactly sure how many students could grasp the complex resistances involved here. Previously I had marveled at the suavity and subtleness of Suleri’s narrative style. But after I discussed the
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text in the classroom, her stance appeared problematic. If Suleri was questioning the usability of available terms of representation, what was at the other end of the spectrum? What possible conclusion might the questioning student draw when Suleri tells her that the joy to be experienced in the company of women in Pakistan is an exclusive experience, one that is beyond comprehension, and beyond her student’s imagination? Assuredly, empathy with the other or a perfunctory acquaintance with cultural conflicts must be avoided at all costs, but my experiences during this course convince me that anti-essentialism carries its own set of privileges and exclusivities. Suleri’s women resist the danger of being incorporated into the Western idiom, but they are still, for all practical purposes, silent. Dayal too points to this flaw in Suleri’s rhetoric:
“There is a danger that Suleri’s ‘meatlessness’ might be construed as mere amorphousness, and therefore as a flaccid negativity and once more a silencing of the Third World subject/woman”
(267).
The stylishness of Suleri’s narrative is built on her refusal to utter stock phrases like
“third world women.” While she presents a most unusual attempt to counter assimilation, her strategy can easily be misconstrued to mean that the experience of third world women belongs to a realm that is as incomprehensible as it is exclusive. This makes the text problematic in a pedagogical context. To assess my students’ understanding of Suleri’s strategy, I drafted an exam question that specially focused on articulating the rationale behind Suleri’s gesture. I tried to keep the language of the prompt as open-ended as possible so that I might not give any hint of my expectations of what was the correct answer:
During our discussion on Meatless Days we spent a lot of time analyzing the response
Suleri offered to the student who asks her why she hasn’t given enough space to women
writers on her syllabus. Suleri’s shocking response is, “Because there are no women in
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the third world” (20). In class we discussed the various possible rationales for this
response and also speculated on some alternative answers to the student’s question.
Keeping in mind our discussions about Meatless Days and all the other texts we’ve read,
imagine that you were a fellow-student in Suleri’s class, and construct an explanation that
you offer to this student, who is justifiably stumped by Suleri’s answer.
Only Ashley and Jennifer ended up answering this question and both responses point to the effectiveness as well as the ambiguity that Suleri’s narrative generates.
Ashley:
Suleri seems to be suggesting that the word “woman” in western society carries too
much connotation beyond gender to apply to the third world…. From a more practical
standpoint the professor may simply have chosen the works that could best convey the
concepts of third world…. There is usually a time lag between male and female
articulators. The professor may have not been able to find any works that would define
women in the same way that she wanted the concept defined because it takes longer for
the female voice to be heard as countries emerge.
Jennifer:
My argument would be Meatless Days is an alternative history of Pakistan…The book
lacks descriptions or explanation because she feels that other third world histories are
too explanatory…Our definition is too confining. What is a woman? First, second, third
world? Why should she make it easy for us? We must learn to see for ourselves…How do
you clump women into a group, especially when they’ve been silent for so long? And this
isn’t an Indian problem. Start thinking about women throughout the world.
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Jennifer presents an argument for drawing lines to differentiate cultural difference, but Ashley puts forth an equally persuasive reason to erase them. My own experience of teaching contained moments for which terms like de-centered and objective proved ineffective. I did not practice a pedagogy that would fit into a neat definition of post-colonial pedagogy. For that matter, even writing this dissertation was accompanied by much apprehension since the format and style did not resemble what one expects from a literary dissertation. Only after several unsuccessful attempts at articulating my experience of teaching, I finally decided to use a combination of voices, including student responses and extracts from my teaching journal, to best articulate the learning experience of those ten weeks. In a sense I had a first-hand experience of Suleri’s predicament in the classroom and had also undergone the frustration of matching up to pre-fixed norms and ideas.
Although I cannot convincingly declare how much my students learned about interacting with cultural otherness, teaching this course definitely revived my belief and conviction in the immense possibilities presented by the teaching situation. But rather than emphasize the classroom’s ability to transform others, I describe it as a unique space where multiple identities can exist simultaneously. Yet, the responsibility that one associates with this role compels one to be vigilant and accountable for every identity that one chooses to either affiliate with or discard.
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Chapter Eight: The Best Way to Learn Something Is to Teach It
Narrating this teaching experience has proved a formidable challenge. I had to repeatedly navigate through the rough waters created by the conflicts that arose between my sense of personhood and my sense of being the teacher. As I look back, what stands out most prominently is the common performative nature of these two roles. Before I actually wrote down my reflections about this experience of teaching, I was not conscious about the extent to which performativity had entered into my pedagogical practices. But now I am inclined to agree with
Pamela Caughie when she asserts that “pedagogy might well be the site where performative theory comes to have public relevance” (92).
Initially, alerted as I was by the experiences of other minority teachers about students’
“terms of reference” (Rey Chow 131) from the racialized teacher, I had chosen to dilute my
Indianness in the classroom. As Cheryl Johnson puts it, “Traditionally, the rightful occupant of the local and particular space has been white and male -- not a brown-drenched signifier of difference” (132). My decision to first hide or mask my Indianness in the first few weeks of the course, and then being compelled to reveal it, has made me investigate what I considered my natural or personal identity. As a result, Indianness has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, and a cause for anxiety. Reading Mukherjee, Naraynan, Ghosh, and Suleri in conjunction with my students has made me question the centrality and fixity associated with the notion of identity. As my narrative in the earlier chapters explicates, the pose or mask of objectivity became increasingly difficult to hold onto because I could not help but react to my students’ mocking comments about the conflicts suffered by Gita Das and Maya Sanyal. The opportunity to travel and come to America grants one the chance to re-invent oneself. As our class analyzed and discussed Gita’s and Maya’s struggle to re-define a new self, it became
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obvious that what one considers as an Indian self is in fact a discursive construct; it is a set of given ideas and values that one is supposed to learn and imbibe, and which over time is naturalized into a cultural identity. However, this realization does not negate the power that terms like Indian or American embody. Nevertheless, like my students Jennifer and Dao did in their responses, I am learning to shift my focus from why to how these categories are set up. As
Jennifer puts it: “I’d like to say that I belong to the American culture but if you ask me to define exactly what that means I’d have no idea where to begin. I don’t want to categorize but….”
Another vital lesson that this teaching experience revealed was the implications of handling cultural differences with regards to gender. In an attempt to dissolve assumptions of hierarchy in both my own and the students’ heads, I had committed to build up my students’ independent thoughts and resist all temptations to impose a specific agenda. For this particular course, highlighting gender conflicts was imperative in keeping with course goals. On most occasions I had tried to lead my students to see connections and affiliations between their situations and the struggles depicted in the texts. But when it came to cultural differences and gender, I found myself in a precarious position. I insistently adopted an antagonistic tone whenever my female students established any kind of identification with the struggles of South-
Asian women. Like Bhabha’s colonial mimicry strategy, I wanted to repeat, you are like her (us), but not quite. But my students did not seem to divide themselves along racial lines. For example,
Jennifer ardently identified with Maya, David went on to find a close affiliation with Panna, and
Dao went beyond her gendered construction to engage with Firoze. I persistently worried if my students actually realized the power differential involved when dealing with cultural difference, or did they identify with these characters merely to celebrate cultural diversity? If dealing with difference meant the recognition of unequal power, Jennifer’s and David’s comments
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demonstrated this sensitivity. My problem was that race-based oppression cannot be understood as paralleling it with gender-based oppression. Feminists like Jane Flax and Ien Ang suggest that one way to deal with gender differences is to maintain a sense of ambivalence and ambiguity. 18
But taking on a stance of ambiguity becomes problematic in the pedagogical situation. One of my initial pedagogical goals had been to lead my students to understand the complicated terrain of living as a South-Asian post-colonial; another inherent goal was to make the students see their role in alleviating difference, and see themselves as active agents of change. But when I encountered, like Suleri, questions of gender and difference, my stance shifted. I discarded the goal of dealing with gender difference to achieve an overarching feminism or establish a sense of order and structure. Instead, I wanted some tensions to remain unresolved. I am still figuring out the reasons to explain my changed perspective.
The mid-term teaching episode emerges as the turning point for my class. As a participant in the student presentations, I felt that my Indianness was being appropriated and caricatured before me by the students. The students were pretending to be experts on India, and I was quick to establish that what one repeats is never identical to the original -- Indian, but not quite. The near duplication of being Indian opened up new spaces. The mid-term assignment took upon the nature of a power conflict, wherein the students-teachers took upon “the look of surveillance [which] returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed” (Foucault 89). Although I was aspiring in this course to project the concept of a fluid, ever-evolving identity, was I really prepared to enlarge my idea of Indianness beyond the given spatial boundaries of geopolitical south-Asia? For example, I was still not
18 See Ien Ang, “I’m a Feminist But” Feminism & ‘Race’ Ed Bhavnani (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University P, 2001) 394-409.
Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: Univ. of California P, 1990) 56-7.
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ready to grant the same sense of displacement to David’s experience of border-crossing from
Utah to Cincinnati. Wasn’t this in some way repeating Maya’s gesture of alienating Fran, and
Gita’s failure of communicating with Bet? I had not understood the validity of Spivak’s admonition until I taught this course. In an interview with Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva,
Spivak rebukes the third world academic: “There is a horrible, horrible thing in minority discourse -- a competition for maximum victimization…. It is absurd to claim authenticity by saying that the homeless in New York City or the rape victims in Pittsburgh have suffered much less that the people in the villages of Bangladesh” (88). Learning from Spivak and my students, I have realized that I should not undermine my sense of belonging to an ethnicity, yet like Ghosh and Suleri I should also beware that our notions of ourselves can often be invented by others, which can lead to distortions, and, in the case of Suleri, make terms like third world women unacceptable.
In the later weeks of the course, my students were prone to express a strong sense of affiliation with the conflicts articulated in the texts. Certainly I was impressed with their ability to form affiliations with the texts, but I was perpetually afraid such a gesture would “depoliticize the real difference between classes and endorse a politics of political lip-synching”
(R.Radhakrishnan). Thus, when I drafted the question, “how well do you feel that you would be able to explain the identity of a post-colonial, South-Asian woman,” as part of the course evaluation, I feared I might receive reductive, simple-minded answers. Once again their responses surprised me. Along with displaying an impressive sensitivity towards South-Asian concerns, they also showed a mature understanding that suggested that identity can never be truly represented.
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David
I would say that my ability to explain the identity of a South-Asian woman is as good
now as compared to before I took the class.
Jennifer
I have a better understanding of identity and how it becomes created or brought about.
Still this is a complex idea, but I have had a chance to become more familiar with
something that was “alien” to me.
Ashley
I think I would be able to better understand someone who is coming from a South-Asian
background after taking this course.
Dao
I feel that I have a broader, less-restricted understanding of South-Asian identity in the
US. I can better describe the complexity of being a South-Asian female maintaining
tradition and assimilating into a new culture.
Jeremy
I kind of feel that I can, but some of my statements may be made on false assumptions. I
don’t think the women in our texts represent India as a whole.
These comments signify my students’ endeavor to escape the confinement of labels; they convey a genuine attempt to build alliances and not fall back into cozy, familiar notions of essence and absoluteness. Though I may be too optimistic in my proclamations, these words do convey an honest attempt at a critical multiculturalism.
In my introduction I quoted at length from Min-Zhan Lu’s essay, “Composing
Postcolonial Studies.” Lu points to the many accomplishments of composition in dealing with
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cultural others and is angered by the academy’s insistence of always imposing the role of
“receiver” on composition studies, instead of giver. I set out armed with the surety that I would not commit the same error because, as a critical educator, I was committed to creating safe zones in my classroom. I drafted open-ended assignments in order to lead students to discover how they draw upon their own cultural resources to produce meaning. But ideology acts in inscrutable ways, and as I reflect upon my pedagogical decisions, I now realize that I had oversimplified and reduced my students’ lived realities to hard, theoretical concepts. The experiences of other ethnic scholars who taught multicultural literature had introduced me to the multiple ways students reacted and resisted them. Learning from their work, I believed that I had trained myself to not treat students as passive receptors. Unfortunately, this did not deter me from assigning pre- determined resistant stances to them. What I did not realize was that, although I rejected the notion of students as passive learners, I resorted to a different kind of essentialism by predicting the ways that they would offer resistance in the classroom. My attempts at de-centering teacher authority were ultimately tenuous because, although my ultimate goal was to empower the students, I was still setting up the goals of how they might empower themselves.
In an unusual carryover of Lu’s argument, I now recognize that, although I acknowledged my students’ resistance, I still identified my students as “receivers.” I had not modeled them as passive and ignorant listeners, yet I had resorted to a different kind of exoticizing. Based on theoretical assumptions and classroom experiences of other teachers of ethnic literature, I predicted their responses to multicultural texts and subconsciously organized my pedagogical strategies to counter those responses. In the words of Peter McLaren and Henry Giroux, I had committed the error of believing that knowledge was produced primarily in the head of the educator or teacher/theorist and not in the interactions between teacher, students, and texts (34).
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Although I did not invalidate the importance of student experiences and resistance, I had contextualized their personhood to represent a white, mid-west, conservative subjectivity. Rather than letting them speak for themselves, I had visualized them as cultural types who would offer a pre-determined resistance to my presence in the classroom. In “Beside Ourselves,” Susan Jarratt suggests Spivak’s strategy of manufacturing versions of herself to displace any fixed sense of the other. “She seems to be saying” writes Jarratt, “If you take me to be feminist, I’ll show how I’m not the same as Western feminists. If you take me for an Indian, I’ll explain elite immigrant privilege…Spivak consistently will not be found where she is sought” (117). Taking my cue from Spivak, my pedagogical experience goes to show that, in this case, it was my students who were not found where I sought (to place) them; in every instance, their responses counteracted my predictions. For example, while teaching Mukherjee’s short story, I had planned to focus on
Maya’s defiance of traditional notions of South-Asian women. But the students’ insistence on focusing on Maya’s unexplained longing for the comfort afforded by the affiliation to an ethnic collectivity teased open new textual meanings. When I expected them to crowd me with questions about my upbringing in India, they refrained from making any personal references in the classroom. Instead I ended up voluntarily divulging information. I intentionally put on a mask of objectivity to complicate their notion of the ethnic teacher, but their performances during the mid-term teaching sessions exposed the performativity of the pedagogical act itself.
Thus, in every instance the students turned around to subvert my assumptions of their resistance.
Arguing for the indisputable importance and influence of theory, both in and outside the academy, Homi Bhabha explains in an interview with Gary Olson, “the operation quality of theory in the public domain is to break the continuity and consensus of common sense. It is to break it and break into it” (11). I apply a similar analogy to the classroom encounter. Bhabha
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uses an example from Heidegger to emphasize the importance of theory: “Until you throw the bridge across the river, you don’t quite know what the banks are. You don’t know what you’re calculating. And I think theory works in that way” (12). Like theory, the unpredictable and volatile nature of the classroom encounter works to keep one always in check; it always applies deconstructive pressure on you. As Spivak says about teaching:
I have found it very powerful that in class what really happens- and I have thought about
it later, I mean I don’t think about it when I am teaching…but what happens is this
strange identity called student which does not allow all the individual specificities to
disappear but puts them under erasure begins to take over. That is a very powerful and
wonderful thing. That is what keeps our professional ethics in place. (217)
The classroom thus emerges as the most significant factor in the teacher-student-text equation.
More effectively that any literary or theoretical interpretation that I had read so far, this teaching experience gave me a sense of actually grappling with the phrase “dealing with cultural difference.” Now that I am more comfortable and willing to inhabit and discuss my cultural identity, I feel greater power and authority. The politics of the personal and professional did get thoroughly entangled, but I realized that my failures in the classroom should not be seen as a set of wrong choices. Rather, the classroom offers a landscape in which learning is mutual and ongoing and no one has really found the right strategy.
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APPENDICES
Chapter One
Text of the Play Enacted Out By Student On the First Day of Class
A Conversation Turns into a Debate
We have chosen to focus on the female protagonists in our literary texts to gain an insight into problems faced by South-Asian women. Why did we choose women in particular? Are their problems greater or more complex than South-Asian men? What does one exactly mean when we say that women have traditionally been burdened with the responsibility of being bearers of tradition and carriers of culture? If we look around our campus, we see most South-Asian women seeming bold and confident, wearing Indian as well as western clothes, and showing no outward signs of being burdened with additional cultural baggage. In order to gain a better understanding into the conflicts of South-Asian women here are extracts from a conversation between three women, taking place at our dining pavilion. The group includes, Jennifer who is American, a native of Cincinnati and a student of DAAP; Neha, a electronic media major who although
Indian, has been born and brought up in the US, and has had a conventional and conservative upbringing. Rhea is a recently arrived student from India and a member of the women’s studies dept. The group has just returned from watching the film, Bend it Like Beckham, which is set in
England, and is the story of an Indian girl who wants to play professional football. The film is enjoyable and funny, but it has sparked off a serious conversation amongst the three friends about South-Asians in the US and issues faced by women.
The Play
Jennifer: Come on, give me a break. Rhea, you have no right to be so obsessed by your foreignness. You are almost too assimilated. You wear jeans and shorts all the time, you act cool,
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and what’s this hang up about, you won’t understand the problems Indian women have. In fact
Neha, who is supposedly born and brought up here, is more conservative than you, who has been brought up in India. How is that? Neha, what is your family’s attitude towards women? Does your older brother also have to answer to your parents and report back to them every hour, like you do? What’s the whole deal?
Neha: (a bit uncomfortable) No, not at all. My brother enjoys all the freedoms of a typical
American teenager. He has even started dating some white girls and though my parents disapprove, they have not directly confronted him.
Rhea: (angrily) And why will they? After all, boys are perceived to be the future caretakers of parents in their old age and prized as such. Girls, on the other hand, are understood to be temporary members of their own families -- their primary roles and responsibilities is to be wives, daughters-in-law, and mothers in the families that they are married into. And while male children carry the aspirations of the family, it is daughters who are the repositories of the family’s honor. Their modesty in speech and behavior must be beyond reproach and it is their duty to ensure that no hint of scandal is introduced by their actions. Among the behaviors that can be deemed ‘immodest’ for girls are included: talking too much and laughing loudly. You should just rebel and dump all your Indian baggage. Come on Neha, this is the United
States…Just chill!!!
Neha: But I like certain things about my culture…. I like to love my family…. I like visiting friends and relatives and having long, pointless discussions about rituals and customs. I also like to go to the temple and take part in the cultural shows organized there. But I also envy my American friends and the freedom they have. Right from my childhood, I have been brought up to believe that the most important legacy of being an Indian is our tradition. And as we are far
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away from home, we have to follow our traditions in our family. If I question Indian customs and traditions, it is considered a betrayal. My mother tells me that the reason for the high divorce rate in America is the break up of the family system.
Rhea: Why don’t you tell your mother that divorce rates in India are as high? Family is just a convenient term to carry on outdated and oppressive customs and traditions. How do parents expect you to fit into American culture at school, but switch back to your Indian self at home?
Jennifer: Why bother about what’s from your culture and what’s not? Just do what you like…
Rhea: No, Jennifer, it is not as simple as that. Remember, you just labeled me as being
“too assimilated.” I may wear blue jeans but I don’t do other American cool things which graduate student friends criticize me for. For example, I’m not cool because I don’t think drinking is fun; I am supposed to read too much meaning into physical gestures. Everything we, as in minorities, do is marked. Either we are exotic or weird. Neha may be considered too exotic and I, too weird. Everything I do is judged or evaluated, either I conform too much or I react and rebel too much.
Neha: Yes, exactly. Sometimes, I feel I want to be open; live beyond cultures …
Jennifer: Who’s stopping you, it’s your choice. Personally, I love Indian culture; we
Americans want to learn more about your country. We welcome cultural diversity. Your food is so cool; I just love the henna and …
Rhea: You think you want to learn. Good! Well, next time I talk to you about some serious issue about India don’t start looking at your watch. I am sick and tired of being regarded
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as the “exotic other.” Everywhere I go people tell me how wonderful India is with its spices and yoga etc. India has a very different reality.
Neha: Yes, I too felt that when I went to India after many years this summer. The India that my parents dream of is long gone. None of the relatives I visited were as conservative as our family. After I returned, I have been uneasy; I am reaching a point of crisis. I want to be recognized as Indian, but at the same time, I want that definition to accommodate the changes in my personality. Traditional Indian women are supposed to be beautiful yet innocent, adorned yet inexperienced, attractive yet abstinent. The traditional roles say that women should be smart, but not smarter than men.
This is unfair and these burdens of tradition have been imposed for too long. I want to discard this false sense of authentic Indian and create a new self. But, what should I discard and what should I embrace? Rhea, Jennifer, help me to answer this question.
Assignment Prompt for Chapter One.
Prompt # 1
I arrived in the United States five years ago. My first few weeks were surprising to say the least, for I had a romanticized image of the US thanks to my limited exposure based on popular media channels like Star TV and MTV.
One of the immediate striking contrasts was that contrary to the stereotype that America is a land of plenty where people enjoy a life of freedom and luxury, I witnessed that the average
American student works at least two jobs, and college is a huge expense and not freely available to all unlike in India. A perennial feeling of loneliness seems to prevail all around. I lived close to school and walked past many fraternity houses on my way. Often I saw Greek-lettered flags hanging, sleek limousines into which elegantly dressed (mostly white) boys and girls stepped in,
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and on certain days a whole bunch of boys and girls would dress in uniform colors and shout slogans. This, I was told was “frat culture.” Soon, I began to wonder what all these different cultures signified. Were they independent sub-cultures or part of the larger concept, termed as
“American culture”? When I walked to the grocery store, I was delighted when people smiled and asked me, how I was doing? But, before I could answer, they would walk off. This, my dept. colleagues told me, was an “American culture,” and implied respect of “personal space.”
The visible and stark racial disparity between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ was quite alarming. I talked to some people in my department about this palpable racial tension and was told, “What else can you expect, this is Cincinnati!” Overall most people just accepted things as they were.
Amongst my Indian friends, I sensed that some of my colleagues had an obvious feeling of superiority towards blacks. They always desired to date a white person but would never venture near any black hang-out places. Surprisingly many of the Indian students behaved strangely; they were parochial, overtly conservative in comparison to Indian society, and some even sported an affected American accent.
As my experience demonstrates for an immigrant a clash or conflict between the “home” culture and the “new” or “foreign” culture is expected. Write for at least one page and point out any places in the text of “The Tenant” which deal with such a clash. You may refer to your text to quote examples.
Notes on Post-colonial
These were distributed to the students during our sessions on Love, Stars and All That. Halfway through our discussions of Naraynan’s novel, I introduced some background notes that explained some basic issues of post-colonialism. I tried to connect Gita’s westernized upbringing in India with the post-colonial residue, but these discussions were ill timed because the notes were a
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deterrent to students’ interaction with the text as a whole. They were more engaged with what happens in the story, which made me realize that in the future I needed to discuss the socio- historical aspects before I got into the textual readings.
What is Post-Colonialism?
In one sense, the term post-colonial refers to a historic period that follows colonization.
As you all may be aware during the eighteenth and nineteenth century Western powers colonized or ruled over many countries of the East. For example, England colonized India and Africa, while the French colonized Algeria. India, as we know it today, was ruled by the British for over three hundred years and finally achieved freedom in 1947.
During the period of colonization the ruling power, the Western power, plundered the colonized land by systematic manipulation of natural and agricultural resources. But more serious and enduring than the economic devastation was the cultural oppression that attacked and devalued the cultural, social and traditional of the colonized people.
The process of colonialism sustained itself by creating derogatory stereotypes of the colonized “native,” thus creating a hierarchy of power relations which projects the colonizer in a superior light. For example, in the case of India, the British interpreted Indian culture and social life as barbaric and uncivilized and thus convinced themselves, that they carried the “white man’s burden” to civilize the life of the Indian native. But as recent post-colonial theorists like
Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ania Loomba etc. have demonstrated, an interrogation of colonial relationships reveals deep-seated problems that render colonial authority problematic. The relationship between the colonizer and colonized is not of complete domination by the colonizer, and total subordination by the colonized but instead, the process of colonialism is complex and multifaceted.
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This re-interpretation of colonial relations offers a new dimension to present problems of post-colonial nations. Moreover, due to increased migrations globally questions like, what is an authentic identity? or what is Indianness? have gained prominence. In order to answer such questions, one needs to take into account the colonial past since this past is closely connected with present identity conflicts and can help us comprehend cultural clashes.
Post-colonial studies have demonstrated that not only did the process of colonialism result in a devastating aftermath in the colonized land, but it also irretrievably changed the personality of the colonizers. In our course, we shall focus on identity conflicts and briefly study concepts like mimicry and ambivalence with a view to understanding the repercussions of colonialism on the psyches of the colonizer as well as the colonized.
What is a Post-Colonial Reading?
A post-colonial interpretation of a literary text could be interpreted as a rereading of all the canonical texts of English literature and situating them in relation to the larger project of
English imperialism and colonialism. This approach includes investigating how colonial stereotypes are produced and reinforced, with special emphasis on how western narratives exoticize the literature of the east into the reductive categories of “oriental” “commonwealth” and “third world.”
Another meaning of the term post-colonial means to interpret the literature produced by previously colonized people as a strategy of resistance to Western or colonial stereotypes or reductive categories. An example of a colonial stereotype may be that all Indian women are universally submissive, weak and oppressed. By stereotype I mean a selective view or perspective about a person or a group of people that unfairly universalizes or reduces people into rigid categories or narrow definitions. Another example is how even after more than fifty years
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of Independence from colonial rule India is still considered primarily as a land of saints, mysticism, exotic women, filth and poverty. This is an example of a colonial stereotype which has carried on into post-coloniality. Among the multiple reasons for the continuation of such stereotypes is the fact that this easy labeling offers the West a convenient context to view India, maintain a certain cultural supremacy whilst projecting a semblance of breakdown of borders.
Many south-Asian writers highlight such cultural stereotypes in their novels, films and short stories and demonstrate how such generalizations “burden” immigrants and are a threat to their sense of self.
There is yet another meaning of the term post-colonial. Some post-colonial literature produced by previously colonized people not only resists and questions western domination and stereotypes, but is also critical of other systems of domination like caste and class hierarchy, racial discrimination and patriarchy. Thus, this perspective takes into account all systems of domination that reproduce unequal power relations and offers a critique and resistance. These other systems of domination are often prevalent even prior to colonization, and most often work in conjunction with the colonizers. For example, during colonial rule in India the upper-class and upper caste male often helped the British to maintain control and domination. This resulted in the lower class, lower caste people and the women were doubly colonized. But even this power equation is not simply binary but leads into further complications like the hierarchy between women of different castes and classes and so on.
It is important to remember that simply because a text subverts or parodies the West does not mean that it is radical or emancipatory and it is crucial to recognize the racism or patriarchy embedded in many post-colonial writers. For example, Wole Soyinka, a prominent and successful playwright from Africa strongly resists and critiques western stereotypes but many of
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his plays are chauvinistic and unfair to women. Thus, the term post-colonial has numerous meanings and connotations and a post-colonial reading offers innumerable possibilities. The primary theorists of post-colonialism like Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Homi Bhabha among others, concern themselves with the social and cultural effect of colonization.
Post-colonial and India: The Multicultural Debate
We are well aware that in the last fifty years the number of south-Asians in the United
States has visibly increased. Many of the Indians, Pakistanis or Sri Lankans who immigrated, did so for various reasons like employment, education or to escape political and economic problems in their own country. What ever may be the reason, it is a fact that at present there are many small diasporic communities of people who live in the United States that may trace back connections to India, Pakistan, South Africa and so on.
Some of you may have often come across the word “diaspora” and wondered what this means? For the purposes of our class, we do not need to go into great details, but it is sufficient to establish that by “diaspora” we mean, communities of people living together in one country, say the US, who acknowledge that the “old country” (for example, India) has some claim on their loyalty and emotions. This connection is often maintained by adhering to customs, traditions, language etc. Thus, even though some people may have taken up US citizenship, they still feel a deep link and connection to their “old” country. Such diasporic communities always feel a sense of loss, and a sense of homelessness and un-belonging.
When the British ruled India British adopted a policy of cultural imperialism attacked the
Indian sense of self. Thus, when the British left India in 1947, they left behind a whole new set of problems like groups of Indians who felt more English than Indian, and thus felt lost and
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confused when the British left. This sense of confusion was quite complex because though many of these people wanted India to be free from foreign rule, they were confused about whether they really “hated” the British. The British did manage to create a class of people who lived and followed English manners and customs, but were not English in race. This sense of confused identity mostly affected upper-class strata, but it also influenced middle and lower class people, many of whom were employed by the British as clerks or in the armed services. After the British left, many of these people who were directly employed in the British government experienced a prolonged sense of loss or what is termed as “raj nostalgia.”
One can only begin to imagine the complexity of problems of post-colonial India. Owing to the varied effects of colonialism, immigrants from south-Asian cultures like India and
Pakistan have different experiences and varying reactions. People who are still steeped in a post- colonial nostalgia face a different kind of hostility and crisis when they come to the West. The
West views them as native Indian, and expects them to show signs of “authenticity,” but instead, is taken aback when these groups show familiarity with English names and customs and are ignorant about Indian culture. On the other hand, some immigrant groups react to the trauma of migration by or creating diasporic communities, such as Chinatowns or Little Indias. Examples of such places are Jackson Heights in New York, which has unofficially been renamed as Jai-
Kishan Heights or Devon Street in Chicago and so on. Often these groups live for years in their closely knit groups and refuse A whole new set of issues relating to hybridity, border crossing, new ethnicities etc. have come up as a result of such migrations. Also, questions like, who should assimilate and, how much? Traumatized by the physical loss of the homeland and terrorized by the thought that they may loose their sense of difference, ethnic minorities as a reflex reaction, often resort to forming closed groups. The West (by West I refer to the white, or majority
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community) is critical of such marginalization and often mocks and discriminates against such ghettoizations. Many believe that the migrant communities should adjust and assimilate, and at times, immerse their native identities and mix or merge with the majority.
Ed Koch, former New York mayor and now talk show host, summarizes the South-Asian position in the United States: “They give us their culture and their taxes and their wonderful restaurants” (qtd. in Prasad 4). Hard working, co-operative and possessing a unique spirituality,
Indians are usually awarded a special place in the American societal hierarchy. As Vijay Prasad argues in his study titled Karma of Brown Folk, “Both intellectual and popular culture approach the desi as something fundamentally different from the ‘American’ (a word that is often used to index whiteness); and both subscribe to the belief that though the latter is practical and worldly, the former is spiritual and ethereal”. But, as Prasad goes on to argue the hypothesis that a community or a group of people possess discrete qualities is an act of racist thought, regardless of the fact that the resulting statements be charitable or not. Can we envision a future where different cultures give and take form each other, where borderlines dim to such an extent that they start leaking into each other? These are some questions that we shall attempt to answer.
Draft of Assignment Prompts for Chapter Five
Mid-Term Assignment
Our mid-term takes place in the first week of May. As you know, for the mid-term each group will “teach” a chosen short story to the rest of us. Based on the drawing of lots at our
Friday class, the groups have already been assigned the short stories and the corresponding dates of presentation.
The spotlight in these presentations is on demonstrating engagement with some primary concerns of the literary texts. This will also be an opportunity to deepen your knowledge of
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certain aspects of South-Asian history, culture, and literature. As you prepare for your presentations keep in mind that one of the primary goals of this class is to examine the identity politics involved in defining a post-colonial South-Asian woman. As you “teach” the texts, highlight the clash of cultures and the split in selves. Moreover, as we read in our background notes, along with problems of other immigrant communities like assimilation, ethnic discrimination and stereotyping, South-Asians carry the additional burden of emerging from previously colonized societies. Try to analyze how this factor complicates the experience of immigration. You might compare the story with any other text we have read in class. These are merely some suggestions and strategies that groups may employ. You can use any other approach as long as it is effective in meeting our class goals. Please meet with your groups: discuss and decide.
Each group will be given 30 minutes to “teach” the story; the lesson will be followed by a class discussion. Each presentation will be timed, and I shall indicate when you have 5 minutes remaining, so that you can wrap up. The rest of the class is expected to read the short story before they come to class, so do not waste time in merely presenting a story outline. You will have access to the internet, and the projector as well as the use of the video/DVD recorder. It is up to each group to come up with a creative and effective use of these sources. As you are aware,
I have also put up some informative websites on India and South-Asia, and groups may use a socio-historic approach to teach the story.
The group presentation will be graded in the following manner: Each question is worth 10 marks.
1. In an interview Bharati Mukherjee states, “I'm not doing an exotic ghetto,
National Geographic Indian number, and I'm not making readers feel good about those
locales -- aren't we quaint, aren't we sweet, aren't we sentimental and emotionally expressive.
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I'm showing white Americans their world in a different way, so they'll never be able to walk down their own streets quite the same way after reading my books.” How would you relate this quote to the story your group has presented?
2. As the short stories and the novel we read demonstrate, the process of immigration involves re-inventing your sense of self and re-analyzing your past. Insecurity, self-doubt and apprehension often accompany this process of re-invention. Also the conflicts involved differ based on gender and class. How does your presentation highlight these identity conflicts?
3. How well did you operate as a group? (I would strongly encourage you to divide the group work and take turns as you “teach” to demonstrate strong group dynamics.)
4. What kind of “other” or non-textual sources were used in your presentation? How did they assist your “teaching” of the story?
The remaining 10 points will be based on the individual written response that each group member submits on the assigned date. This written response will be one typed page and will focus on your experience of teaching a short story from another culture. I shall put up the prompt as we approach the mid-term presentations.
Questions for Written Response
Your individual response should not be less that one-typed page.
1. From the short story that your group presented, choose one character that you most
identified with, and in one paragraph give reasons for your choice.
2. According to the class description for our course, this class aims to look at a few South-
Asian literary texts with the goal of examining the identity politics involved in defining a
post-colonial South-Asian woman. Another goal is to examine texts that concern
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problems involving migration because the migratory experience highlights the clash of cultures and the split in selves and because women have traditionally been burdened with the responsibility of being bearers of tradition and cultural carriers. Keeping these class goals in mind as you prepared to teach and present this story, what is the one thing you learned about these goals because you were the teacher and not the student?
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