Jessica Peterson

We All Belong: Inclusion in a Multicultural Literature Course

While my undergraduate background is in English and I am currently working on a master’s degree in Literature, I pursue the field because of a love and appreciation for reading and writing and my desire to teach college level English courses. While I have learned many concepts and terminology throughout my college career, I have not looked at the curriculum as accessible and applicable for my future career endeavors until this World Literature course. I had little previous exposure to colonial and post-colonial literature, but now understand the important connection between history and literature to make issues of the past have relevancy in our current culture and society. 

As the cultural landscape continues to grow and expand into an even broader “melting pot” of cultural traditions, languages and religious beliefs, it is important to realize the importance of multicultural literature in the classroom to foster acceptance and embrace diversity of students from different backgrounds and walks of life. Multicultural literature, according to Susan Landt, provides students for students “not a static, narrow vision, but a spectrum of possibilities. [The] goal is to facilitate awareness and availability of quality literature that can provide minds with a richer, clearer, and more accurate window through which to gaze” (691). As a teacher, I want to broaden the world view of my students and shift their perspective from one of ambivalence and misguided prejudices to a more accepting attitude that channels a diverse value system, inclusive of the cultural differences that surround them.

As I consider which texts to include in my future English classroom, I want to make decisions that will best suit a multicultural learning environment, and result in inclusion. As a teacher, I do not want to separate multicultural literature from the traditional literature commonly included in the canon of a “regular” College English course, but instead find ways that the texts can mediate the “culture wars” between the “old” and “new” canon, as Objective 1A explains. As James Banks clarifies, “The major theorists and researchers in multicultural education agree that the movement is designed to restructure educational institutions so all students, including middle class white males, will acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to function effectively in a culturally and ethnically diverse nation and world” (3). By reading texts as codependent and supplementary to one another, the curriculum units merge into one encapsulating unit of diversity, rather than separate units of multicultural literature, and collaborates majority and minority literature into one cohesive and complete entity. Only when different genres of literature are read in conjunction can parallel themes and ideas emerge, noting in more similarities among diverse groups than differences.

Inclusive study of a variety of texts fosters more acceptance and a shift to perspectives of tolerance, rather than a focus on class and culture tensions and prejudices. When reading the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Woodsworth in context with the novel Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, it is easier to see the relation between the two texts. Lucy is an account of a young woman’s journey as she moves from her Caribbean homeland to her life as an au pair in America. She lives a life of isolation and detachment, as she cannot relate to the affluent lifestyle of the family she lives with. When Mariah takes her to see the daffodil field and has a poetic encounter with the flowers herself, Lucy’s counter reaction is “…nothing could change the fact that where she saw beautiful flowers I saw sorrow and bitterness”. Lucy was forced to memorize a poem about the flowers, which symbolizes to her control by forces of colonialism and a imposing of the unfamiliar, which results in her isolation from the white majority. Even though the poem is a light and uplifting text, focusing on the beauty and landscape created by the daffodils; however, the voice of the poem seems to have trouble forming an attachment to the beauty in front of them, “I gazed-and gazed-but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought”. The beauty of the flowers has little to no effect on the narrator, they cannot find a way to relate or connect to what they are experiencing.

By noticing the intertextuality between the novel and the poem, we can put the two in dialogue and notice how two different writings can share the common theme of isolation and social detachment. This also satisfies Objective 2b, to extend genre studies to poetry and film. By incorporating other types of texts in a multicultural literature classroom, students can make a connection with a particular theme or concept in a text that is familiar and enjoyable for them. Poetry can also oftentimes have a voice that is more of a personal narrative and bring the dialogue relationship with a complementary novel into existence, easing the understanding of the multicultural genre and making it more interactive and accessible to students unfamiliar with its thematic intent.

Opposites React: The Self-Other Relationship in Multicultural Literature

We can also apply the concept of self-other in a didactic pairing with modernity to better understand a newly comprised literary canon of both colonial and post-colonial texts, in which inclusion can offer a different purpose within the context of multicultural literature; how a differing perspective or a dominant cultural majority can oppress and subjugate the minority and result in social and class tension. In the article “Mimicry, Ambivalence, and Hybridity”, the relationship between Crusoe and Friday is seen as one in which the “simple presence of the colonized Other within the textual structure is enough evidence of the ambivalence of the colonial text, an ambivalence that destabilizes its claim for absolute authority or unquestionable authenticity”. Crusoe’s relationship with Friday is to use his as a mouthpiece, instead of an actual relationship with him built on human interaction and fair treatment. He nicknames him “Friday” because that is the day he met him; he is not concerned with the details of his life and seems more concerned with the issue of modernity, removing Friday from his traditional values and beliefs to a more colonized livelihood. Crusoe, in training Friday to mimic his traditions, receives such self-validation and treats their interaction as a relationship of hierarchy rather than mutual understanding and acceptance.

Crusoe, in his dealings with and treatment of Friday, personifies the concept of ethnocentrism, in that his personal belief is that his own cultural group is most significant or important and Friday’s culture is measured in relation to his own, falling short every time, according to Crusoe. It is interesting that our predominant misconception about the character and story of Robinson Crusoe is that he was a castaway, adding this new and significant trait of slave trade heightens the racial and class tension prevalent in the novel and completely shifts our treatment of the main character. We must be inclusive and read his character as castaway alongside slave trader, which changes not only his motivations for his actions but also how we perceive him and view him in the self-other relationship.

Jamaica Kincaid also wrote a supplementary article that can be read and discussed in conjunction with Lucy titled “A Small Place” about her homeland of Antigua and post-colonial influence from the English. When the novel and article are studied simultaneously, it becomes apparent, according to Sarah DeLaRosa’s 2009 midterm essay “Yours, Mine, and Ours: Combining Colonial-Postcolonial Literature Studies and Contact Zone Theory in the American Classroom”, that “The English culture was imposed upon many Caribbean nations through colonization, and Kincaid shows us the injustice of that history throughout her works.” In conjunction with Objective 3a , Kincaid’s writings question the distinction between the role of America as an imperial, colonial or neo-imperial nation or an “empire in denial”.

Kincaid seems to find a reasonable solution for the dissension between American and Antiguan cultures; “…all this fuss over empire – what went wrong here, what went wrong there – always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English”. This emotionally-charged explanation seems to position America as an “empire in denial” (Obj.3a) and “[addresses] otherness by rejecting it in favor of ordinariness, an ordinariness that levels many of the distinctions upon which self and other are predicated” (Gauch 910). Kincaid would rather associate with the Antigua she grew up with, which garnered a sense of familiarity and contentment from her because it was free of American influence, rather than the Antigua that has been drastically altered by traditions of the English culture.

Another example of an “empire in denial” is the involvement Peachey and Dravot have with the people of Kafiristan in The Man Who Would Be King. The purpose of their travels is to make “proper gentleman” of the Kafiristan people and train them in the usage of weaponry in battle. Their misguided justification for this is “Dravot gives out that him and [Peachey] were Gods and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey [them]” (Kipling 2.36). The two men symbolize England’s empire and seemingly contradict England’s colonial attitude with a more revolutionary one. Both “A Small Place” and The Man Who Would be King highlight how ignorance of an outside cultural influence, whether a traditional or controversial influence, can result in dissension and violent opposition.

            Because of our over society’s overreliance on the “traditional” canon of English writers, we often are out of touch with multicultural texts. This omission can form a detachment for many students of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and leave them out of touch with the curriculum and discussion of an English classroom. Including a broad range of authors can make a cohesive learning environment in which students can relate to the stories they read and interact with the characters and themes on a more personal level.

            I have an interest in doing mission work in Africa, so a particular topic I would like to do research on for the two post assignment is the genocide in Rwanda, specifically using Phillip Gourevitch’s haunting account on the genocide in Rwanda in his book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families. I would like to focus on the guilt associated with this and how the treatment of women of children has been altered since that horrific event took place in 1994. Also, I am interested in how to best serve the needs of those people and how both narrative and dialogue can have an important function in minimizing American ignorance of Rwanda.

            Overall, the readings and class discussions have broadened my perspective of global issues and the relevancy and accessibility multicultural texts will offer to my future students. This class has increased my awareness of how much the history of a culture influences the literature and that they two must be in dialogue with one another to be a more inclusive representation of diverse people and places.