Can We Talk About How, Not Just What? Teaching Australian, Indigenous, and World Literatures in Complex Classrooms
Journal Publication ResearchOnline@JCUAbstract
In his essay collection Of Color, Jaswinder Bolina observes: The white masters, masters though they may be, are oblivious to those experiences of bigotry and exclusion that are condemnably common for the rest of us. In this essential matter, those writers of the literary canon are utterly ignorant, and so their reports on the human condition are gapingly incomplete. (302) While the practice of teaching literature that challenges dominant worldviews may present students with expanded narratives of the human condition, the often-unacknowledged effects of colonialism in contemporary classrooms can make literary studies a conflict zone. Diana Brydon acknowledges this in her essay, “Cross-Talk, Postcolonial Pedagogy, and Transnational Literacy.” Yet, apart from Brydon, only a handful of scholars, including Ingrid Johnston, Jyoti Mangat, and Cynthia Sugars in Canada, or Sandra Phillips and Clare Archer-Lean in Australia, have raised the issue of how difficult texts might be unpacked in complex classrooms. In general, most literary studies academics continue to focus their scholarship on the world of the text, instead of the dynamics of the text in the world. Given the growing interest in and teaching of Indigenous lives and texts, as well as a resurgence of interest in the legacies of colonialism raised by movements like Black Lives Matter, Free Palestine, and the Australian referendum on the Voice to Parliament, there is more to unpack in the classroom encounter.
Journal
Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Publication Name
N/A
Volume
23
ISBN/ISSN
1833-6027
Edition
N/A
Issue
2
Pages Count
14
Location
N/A
Publisher
Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Publisher Url
N/A
Publisher Location
N/A
Publish Date
N/A
Url
N/A
Date
N/A
EISSN
N/A
DOI
N/A