teaching moments, pro and con

[deborah]

My students all appear great this semester: thoughtful, provocative, and engaged with what one another say. I've had some good teachable moments in class so far, including a moment when a student responded to a critical article's claim that ethnic Americans have seemingly no mythology inherently their own, by saying "well, there was a mythology, but we came here and we wiped out everyone, so then it was gone". (I paraphrase what the student said, and the critical article was Celestine Woo, "Toward a Poetics of Asian American Fantasy: Laurence Yep's Construction of a Bicultural Mythology", Lion and the Unicorn 30:2, April 2006. To be fair to Woo, though the quotation is provocative both in and out of context, she is using "ethnic American" to mean... well, I'm not entirely sure, but I think she is talking about non-immigrant WASP culture. And I should emphasize that the student is one of the smart, thoughtful types who occasionally provides teachable moments because high levels of student engagement sometimes mean that such things get said if we are operating at the pace of a discussion class. Moreover, the student responded thoughtfully to the follow-up discussion.)

I thought I did okay in engaging the students with thinking about that one (apart from some teaching/race fail on my part where I said "Anansi" and meant "Coyote", and what does that say about my brain?), and then came home and read sanguinity's essay "...the native peoples had the most troubles with the immigrants...". And... I know I am absolutely guilty about what she is discussing, and I'd never thought about it in those terms before. I shall have to think back about the conversation in class and see if that conversation carry the same connotations.

Class was loaded in all kinds of ways, actually. We were discussing a book by a PoC which was based loosely on non-Western myths, and one student in the class came from a similar but hardly identical background as the author. She did volunteer that she knew a version of the myths. I haven't yet had enough experience navigating the minefield of not wanting to ask that student to Represent On Behalf Of Her Culture, but also not wanting to speak as an expert about something for which one of my students might have substantially more in-depth knowledge that I do. (It wasn't a set of myths for which I am a subject expert, not even an outsider subject expert.)

It makes me think, though, that whenever I am teaching and talking about some culture which is not my own, I should always act as if one of my students might be from that culture. For all I know it's true, anyway. (It's related to how I started to confront a lot of my own internalized racism; always assume that somebody standing behind me in any conversation is a member of a group I'm discussing. When I realized how much I was self-censoring, that made me realize how much I was saying that needed reeducation.)

Comments

[badgerbag]

your last paragraph! I agree very hard with it! thanks for setting that out so clearly.

[sanguinity]

Yes, me too. I tend to use "assume you're talking about the family of someone in the room/earshot", but the principle is much the same, I think.

[deborah]

you're welcome! Aside from the usual constraints (personal information which is nobody else's business, NSFW stuff, bitchy backstabbing gossip, etc.) I've been trying to live really hard as if there is always somebody listening to what I'm saying. I don't know if it's made a difference to how I think, but I'm trying.

[sanguinity]

:: ...I said "Anansi" and meant "Coyote", and what does that say about my brain? ::

...that you've been reading Iktomi stories?


:: and I'd never thought about it in those terms before. ::

May I ask what terms you were thinking about it in? (If you'd rather, privately is fine.) I've been puzzled by some of the reactions to the post.


Woo: in endnote 9, the "whereas" appears to set up "ethnic Americans" and "white Americans" as two different categories of Americans. No?

Considering her endnote 9 against her "no mythologies inherently their own" question, it seems to me that she just overlooked Native Americans altogether: Native Americans in America are certainly less displaced than white Americans from Britain, and she seems to be using the latter as her displacement yardstick.

I think Woo is making a special pleading for white Americans in asserting that they don't have to account for displacement within their mythology. While there's a certain something that comes with feeling able to assert (inaccurately, as you point out in the other post) that this one set of stories are shared by us all, there are also clear issues of displacement in the mythologies of white Americans. The mythologies that go with this land are not the mythologies of Britain, and British mythologies cannot be made to serve. (Referencing my own landscape: there are no British stories about Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and Mt. St. Helens, nor are there British stories about orcas. It is very obvious to me why one so often runs into the phrase, "There is an old Indian tale...")

That said, with respect to this statement from endnote 9(you'd think that was the only thing I read in the whole article), "for self-identified ethnic American groups, the chasm is more evident between their ethnic origin and Britain", I find Malinda Lo's Ash very interesting. Lesbians and East Asians in what is clearly Fantasy Britain, and present without explanation for how they got there: Fantasy Britain had always had lesbians and East Asians.

[steepholm]

Woo: in endnote 9, the "whereas" appears to set up "ethnic Americans" and "white Americans" as two different categories of Americans. No?

Yes. It seems pretty clear that Woo has in mind non-white ethnic groups who have immigrated over the last several centuries. I agree she leaves Native Americans out of the equation. She also doesn't really account for ethnic groups who are white but not British (or "western European" - the two seem to be synonymous for her). Where do, say, the Italians, the Czechs, or indeed gnomicutterance fit in her schema?

I too find it dubious, this idea that white Americans have no mythology of displacement. I'm not American myself, so maybe don't fully understand its function, but I thought that Thanksgiving served precisely this purpose: not just a myth but a eucharist to boot!

(To be fair, we always have had lesbians here in Britain, and I don't see why Fantasy Britain need be denied them. Or are these Lesbians as in "from the island of Lesbos"? Sorry - I've not read Lo's book!)

[sanguinity]

:: Where do, say, the Italians, the Czechs, or indeed gnomicutterance fit in her schema? ::

Thank you. I'm not sure I managed to pull together everything into actual words on the screen last night.

:: but I thought that Thanksgiving served precisely this purpose: not just a myth but a eucharist to boot! ::

Yes! This article about the social history of Thanksgiving as a holiday -- when did it start being celebrated, how did it spread, who was pushing it, why did the school system get so deeply involved -- does a really nice job laying that out. (The article is not nearly so long as those 17 pages of links makes it look: not much text on a page, and a huge chunk of those pages are endnotes.) The article describes an effort to push immigrants from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe into celebrating a common national mythology.

:: To be fair, we always have had lesbians here in Britain... :

I worded that badly, thank you. Not so much Britain-with-lesbians (because as you point out, of course Britain always had lesbians), as a Britain that is not heteronormative, and which doesn't use sexuality as an identity-construct. Cinderella goes to the ball, leaves with another woman, and no one cares beyond the gossipy "Oh, they've hooked up now? Why does no one ever tell me these things?" This thread and the linked essays might explain better.

As to how it's relevant to Woo's essay, Lo wrote a Cinderella fantasy in which East Asians are just there in fairytale society, and present without any race/ethnicity/nationalism construct that applies to them. They're unremarkably default English like everyone else in the story is unremarkably default English. In Woo's terms (as I understand her), Lo has written a fantasy that is deliberately designed to "close the chasm" between "their origins and Britain", mostly by saying that East Asians were there in the societies of these stories all along, and present in a completely undifferentiated way.

[steepholm]

Thanks so much for the Thanksgiving essay link - that's really fascinating (I'd never even heard of the Fantasticals, who sound like they wandered in from some other kind of festival altogether). And I see now what you were getting at with the lesbians. I wish I could say that Britain wasn't heteronormative, but alas I can't!

[deborah]

Yes, that's very odd, and I find it to be heavily problematic article. (I probably shouldn't teach it so early in the semester, given how problematic I find it, and I do give it with a generic "I assign these articles not because I agree with them but because I think they will spur interesting conversations". Unfortunately, at the beginning of the semester students often interpret that warning as a place where they can talk about being hurt that the essay has accused them by implication of growing up with white privilege, and it's not really the most fruitful discussion. Need to think about that.)

But to play devil's advocate and support the essay, the white American mythology of displacement is definitely one of success. In graduate school, Lissa Paul taught a class on the Canadian imagination where the core of her argument was actually that the American mythology is of success and the Canadian mythology is of failure, which I was very hostile to at the time but I'd like to go back to now as a more thoughtful person. And the mythology of "we came, we made friends, we took over" is very different from the mythology of all of the intervening waves of immigration (white and otherwise) which is one of assimilation and loss of culture.

[deborah]

May I ask what terms you were thinking about it in?

I think I was holding up the mindset that is always valuable to point out the harm done by the kyriarchy, and not thinking about all the ways in which it's just a tool to do so. One of the reasons it's taken me so long to respond to any of the comments on this pair of posts is because your post, followed by this question, gave me some painful soul-searching about when I point to the reinforcement of hegemonic power structures (which is usually when they are so distant in my experience that I not only can't claim responsibility but there's seemingly nothing I can do to address the problem), and when I ignore them (when they are closer to me). Which is an obvious revelation, when I say it out loud like that, but still it's painful to realize that so much of what I think of as Ally Behavior is actually using somebody else's oppression as a tool. As an example, it's made me think of how often I use a politician or political party's hatred of immigrants as a rhetorical tool with which to beat the politician (frequently), compared how often I go to immigrant support rallies (never).

Considering her endnote 9 against her "no mythologies inherently their own" question, it seems to me that she just overlooked Native Americans altogether

That's probably the most likely; I was trying to give her a benefit of the doubt, but you are right that a close reading of the text strongly implies your interpretation.

there are also clear issues of displacement in the mythologies of white Americans. The mythologies that go with this land are not the mythologies of Britain, and British mythologies cannot be made to serve. (Referencing my own landscape: there are no British stories about Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and Mt. St. Helens, nor are there British stories about orcas. It is very obvious to me why one so often runs into the phrase, "There is an old Indian tale...")

There is a combined set, I guess, of the mythologies of WASP Americans. (Is WASP derogatory? It was when I was growing up but I'm not sure if that was my context or not.) It's a little bit of Britain, a little bit of Vikings, a little bit of Brothers Grimm, a little bit of Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, and a little bit of "old Indian tales". And I feel like it is expected to serve for all of us.

I find Malinda Lo's Ash very interesting. Lesbians and East Asians in what is clearly Fantasy Britain, and present without explanation for how they got there: Fantasy Britain had always had lesbians and East Asians.

So the other reason I delayed responding to any of these comments was because I decided to read Ash over the weekend (I had it in a pile of library books I needed to read and return anyway), and I didn't read any of the characters as being of East Asian descent. Did I miss something? I mean, except inasmuch as the author is of East Asian descent.

But definitely, as you say, fantasy Britain has always had lesbians. Fascinating.

Dumbledore is Gay

[sanguinity]

:: I didn't read any of the characters as being of East Asian descent. Did I miss something? ::

I had precisely the same reaction when I read the book. I'd been hearing gossip about how those characters were East Asian, and then found no evidence of that in the book. Apparently, Lo cast them as East Asian and has said so on her blog, but also wanted a world in which the characters were not subject to race as a social construct. She thus found herself in a bind where she couldn't find a clear way to tell the reader what race people were:

Writing About Race in Fantasy Novels
Writing About Race in Fantasy Novels, Part 2

So maybe I should have said that Lo attempted to write a fantasy Britain that had always had East Asians. And that the world she envisioned is interesting in the context of Woo's essay. However, I think it is safe to say that no one who came to the books unprimed would walk away thinking that given characters were East Asian.

Re: Dumbledore is Gay

[deborah]

Heh. Our comment responses crossed in the ether.

[sanguinity]

:: I think I was holding up the mindset that... ::

Thank you.

...and I think I may be silent for a while now, while I think about that.

[deborah]

Ah. Just read the thread you linked to which points to Lo's own opinions, and yes, I wondered if that's what she was going for, as respects to "I won't describe race and I will let you make your own decisions". I tend to disbelieve that this world, which is constructed (a) to have cultural and political colonialism in the form of the Philosophers and (b) there's a vast historical sense of importance tied to history of place, is one in which physical descriptors which show you as having ancestry from Elsewhere is not important, and I would want her to convince me of that (as she convinced me that sexuality is not important despite the societal markers of heteronormatively).

With the author's background and your comment here in mind, I chose to read the characters as primarily East Asian and white as a mix, but I don't think I would have done that if I hadn't had extratextual pointers telling me to. I've been trained in how to read Fantasy Britain, you know?

[sanguinity]

Crossed comments! :-)

Yes. From a worldbuilding perspective, I can't come up with a backstory that fits all of the details in the book. Not only is there colonialism and a China trade, but Fantasy Britain is relentlessly British: if there are East Asians in that society, either their ethnic origins are within Britain, or they brought nothing with them but their skin.

Which tweaks me very badly, actually: if those characters really are East Asian, that world has one of the worst cases of assimilate-or-die that I've ever seen.


:: I've been trained in how to read Fantasy Britain, you know? ::

Yes!

...I keep coming back to: can you do what she wanted to do? How do you pull off textual colorblind casting of fairy tales (for what is essentially the same reason that you do colorblind casting of Shakespeare productions) in such a way that you let people know that you did it? And can you even do it in such a way that it plays nicely with the in-story geographies? Writer-brain keeps poking at that, it does.