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

[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.