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

[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.