Pedagogic possibilities of diasporic texts in a contemporary literature classroom: a postcolonial analysis

© 2020 Mary Elizabeth PurcellOver recent decades, the demography of Australian classrooms has changed considerably. This is evident in the increased mobility, cultural diversity and transnational connectivity that students live and experience. However, the literature curriculum continues to maintain a focus on the English canon. It tends to ignore the diverse knowledges and literatures within the students’ cultural repertoire. This project, therefore, seeks to respond to this anomaly by examining the ways in which a text produced by an Australian-Asian diasporic writer has the potential to contribute to the development in students of ‘transnational literacy’ (Spivak, 1992). It investigates how diasporic texts might help contemporary students to negotiate their identities and understand their ‘worldliness’ (Said, 2003) in relational, critical and reflexive ways. Using a range of critical tools from recent postcolonial theory, this research is based on a pedagogic experiment. It involves the researcher teaching a postcolonial text to Year 11 students, observing student responses to the text, and interviewing them to generate data that is analysed through a constant movement between theory and data, privileging neither. This data suggests that, within the transnationalised and hybridised space of the contemporary Australian classroom, some students find difficulty negotiating the dominant norms of Australianness, and identify nation-centric narratives as key sources of feelings of confusion and exclusion. Yet, by the end of the course of study, after contesting these norms, the majority of these students reported changes in their epistemic constructions of themselves and of others. As they began to see themselves differently, they were becoming better prepared to imagine the Other who was pushing back at the self. Based on this insight, this thesis shows that the teaching of diaspora literature is a useful tool in steering students towards transnational literacy inasmuch as it highlights the ambiguities, ambivalences, and the hybridities that they experience and gives useful insights into how ‘reading otherwise’ is essential for its development. In conclusion, this thesis proposes a new form of literary pedagogy that takes into account contemporary social changes and recognises that they necessitate a new ethical receptiveness, a transnational sensibility that is disposed towards cultural difference. Achieving such recognition emerges from a deliberate process of slow reading and imaginative training to focus on often overlooked detail, and importantly involves privileged subjects showing awareness of their complicity within transnational hierarchies of power