Reading Practices, Postcolonial Literature, and

Cultural Mediation in the Classroom

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Reading Practices, Postcolonial Literature, and
Cultural Mediation in the Classroom

Ingrid Johnston
University of Alberta, Canada

Jyoti Mangat
Bellerose Composite High School, Alberta, Canada
 DEDICATION

To Dad, Aman, Bin, Rob and the rest of my family for your love and support. And
always, of course, to the memory of Mom. Thank you.

Jyoti.

To my grandchildren: Damon, Sebastien, Hana and Jackson. Thank you for

reminding me of the important things in life.
Ingrid.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Reading Practices, Postcolonial Literature, and

Cultural Mediation in the Classroom vii

1. Spaces of Impact: Adolescents Interrogating a

Story of the Air India Bombing 1

2. Truth or Lie: Students Reading the Indeterminacies of an

Aboriginal Auto/Biographical Text 15

3. Telling Too Much: Cultural Translation in

African Novels for Adolescent Readers 25

4. Outside the Comfort Zone: Re-locating Ourselves in a

Postcolonial Literary Pedagogy 35

5. National Identity and the Ideology of

Canadian Multicultural Picture Books:
Pre-service Teachers Encountering
Representations of Difference (co-authored with
Joyce Bainbridge and Rochelle Skogen) 55

Afterwords 71

Appendix 75

Index 77

v
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was made possible by the contributions of the many high school
students, teachers and undergraduate students who generously participated in the
studies described here.
Many colleagues, family members, friends, and graduate students played a
significant role in enabling this book to be written and offering helpful
suggestions. We would like to offer special words of gratitude to Dr Lois Edge for
formatting the text so carefully at a particularly busy time of her life. Thank you
also to the two anonymous reviewers who offered thoughtful feedback on an early
version of the manuscript.
Thank you to Dr Joyce Bainbridge and Dr Rochelle Skogen, co-authors of
chapter five in this book. We also thank Dr Mavis Reimer for permission to
reproduce this chapter, which originally appeared in Canadian Children’s
Literature, (2006). 32, (2): 76-96.
Finally, we would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Faculty of Education’s Support for Academic
Scholarship for funding a number of these studies and the University of Alberta
and school boards in the Edmonton area for encouraging our research cooperation.

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 INTRODUCTION

READING PRACTICES, POSTCOLONIAL

LITERATURE, AND CULTURAL MEDIATION IN THE
CLASSROOM

The post-colonial text persuades us to think through logical categories which

may be quite alien to our own. For a text to suggest even as much is to start
the long overdue process of dismantling classical orientalism. (Vijay Mishra
and Robert Hodge, 1991, p. 382)
The purpose of this book is to consider how postcolonial literary texts are able to
provide a space of cultural mediation for readers from various ethnocultural
backgrounds. The studies that comprise this book explore the spaces of
convergence of identity, culture and literature with students and teachers in high
school contexts and undergraduates in university settings. In each study, readers
are responding to texts that are culturally distant from their own literary and
experiential histories. In such texts, as Steen Larsen and Janos László (1990)
explain, “readers must construct for themselves an understanding of the imaginary
world with which the text deals” (p. 426). An objective of each study was to
consider the nature of the cultural locations of the reader and the text and the
“interstitial spaces” between these locations (Bhabha, 1994, p. 36).
Our primary interest here is to interrogate how readers attempt to negotiate
cultural difference in literary contexts and how this negotiation requires reading
practices often ignored in North American classrooms. Traditional high school
reading practices have tended to focus on the New Critical approach of ‘close
reading’ of texts, with an almost exclusive concentration on explication of literary
elements such as symbolism, metaphor and syntax. Related to this still-entrenched
approach to literature is the selected literature itself. A traditional canon of school
literature remains within many teaching and learning environments (Bender-Slack,
2010, Johnston, 2003). As bell hooks (1994) explains:
The unwillingness to approach teaching from a standpoint that includes
awareness of race, sex, and class is often rooted in the fear that classrooms
will be uncontrollable, that emotions and passions will not be contained. To
some extent, we all know that whenever we address in the classroom subjects
that students are passionate about there is always a possibility of
confrontation, forceful expression of ideas, or even conflict. (p. 39)
This reluctance to engage with difficult questions of culture and difference often
exists even within schools where teachers have an awareness of the increasing
ethnocultural diversity of their school population and a desire to support the need
to promote multicultural education. The attention to cultural diversity often takes

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INTRODUCTION

the form of an adherence to static notions of multiculturalism that seek to value

pluralism but take little account of the dynamic and complex nature of cultural
difference. Homi Bhabha (1994) has pointed to distinctions between the two ways
of representing culture. He argues that signifiers of cultural diversity merely
acknowledge a variety of separate and distinct systems of behaviour, values and
attitude, and may entrench ideas that such differences are ‘exotic’ and static.
Cultural difference, he suggests, moves beyond thinking that cultural authority
resides in a series of fixed and unchanging objects and stresses the process by
which we come to know these objects and bring them into being. For Bhabha, the
concept of cultural difference emerges from post-structuralist thinking and
psychoanalysis, and is linked with the radical ambivalence that he sees in all
colonial discourse. This ambivalence, he argues, is evident in any act of cultural
interpretation, which is never static but is always changing and open to further
possible interpretations. As Bhabha (1994) elaborates:
Cultural diversity is an epistemological object—culture as an object of
empirical knowledge—whereas cultural difference is the process of the
enunciation of culture as ‘knowedgeable’, authoritative, adequate to the
construction of systems of cultural identification…. Cultural diversity is the
recognition of pre-given cultural contents and customs; held in a time-frame
of relativism it gives rise to liberal notions of multiculturalism…. The
concept of cultural difference focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of
cultural authority. (p. 34)
Multicultural education in its focus on the more outward and static signs of
cultural diversity has become the North American mantra for paying attention to
issues of culture. Laurie Grobman (2007) asserts that
Multicultural texts require new critical attitudes and pedagogical approaches.
Prevailing models of multicultural theory and criticism, crucial as they are,
do not adequately address the issue of difference as it operates in
multicultural literary study and pedagogy. Although existing efforts to
foreground difference do address students’ (and most readers’) tendencies to
universalize multicultural texts by highlighting their cultural elements,
merely recognizing difference is not enough. (p. 32)
Multicultural education initiatives in Canada have focused on the need to
acknowledge the claims of indigenous inhabitants and to make provision for an
increasingly pluralistic immigrant population. In addition, Canada’s initiatives
have been guided by themes of bilingualism and the safeguard of heritage
languages, attempting to reconcile the maintenance of the cultures of the so-called
“Two Founding Nations” of Britain and France, with an added commitment to the
numerous other cultural groups in the country, including the many Aboriginal
cultures. Official policies of multiculturalism, issues of human rights, and antiracist
teaching philosophies have increased teachers’ awareness that changes need to be
made in what and how they teach. Yet these policies have done little to help
English teachers to understand how complex questions of representation are

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intertwined with issues of culture, race, gender, and ethnicity or to comprehend

what it means to initiate new and transformational reading practices in their
schools. As a result, despite “official” policies of multiculturalism that have been
mandated at both federal and the provincial levels, changes have largely been
ideological rather than structural and schools continue to function largely as
assimilationist agencies.
Ato Quayson (2001) argues that in the multicultural classroom context, “even
when attention is paid to the realities of race, class and identity, this is carefully
managed so as to delink them from lived experience in order to detonate their
potential explosiveness” (p. 184). Similarly, Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron
McCarthy (2001) consider that, generally, multicultural education in North
America has resulted in the creation of a discourse of containment about cultural
difference. They point out that
multicultural education has become the new metadiscipline that is most often
deployed to address the current eruption of difference and plurality in social
life now invading the school. It has become a set of propositions about
identity, knowledge, power and change in education, a kind of normal
science, which attempts to “discipline” difference rather than be transformed
by it. (p. 113)
According to these critics, while multicultural education in North America has
succeeded in focusing more attention on questions of culture, it has done so by
solidifying culture as an object of study. Students from “non-mainstream” cultures
are thereby invited to retain and celebrate their nationalist histories and
knowledges, while schools continue to resist the need to address complex issues of
power relations, subjugated knowledges and practices. Despite paying lip service
to the need for changes in reading practices, high school educators have
overwhelmingly resisted any substantial shifts in how they approach literary
studies in their classrooms. Most of the well-loved texts that have remained on
school reading lists for decades continue to be taught, with little attempt to
deconstruct or address issues of race, class, gender that appear in the literature, or
to uncover the ideologies of the texts. Often, the introduction of some new
multicultural texts is presented as an “add-on” to existing literature and taught as a
culture tour of exotic and unknown places. In such classrooms, multicultural
education is played out by parading newly represented cultures in what Deborah
Britzman et al. (1993) have called “a seamless parade of stable and unitary
customs and traditions or in the individuated form of political heroes modeling
roles” (p. 189). Knowledge of these cultures, the authors continue, “is presented as
if unencumbered by the politics and poetics of representation” (p. 189).
Postcolonialism, in contrast, offers possibilities for educators to challenge such
binaries as “here-there,” “white-black,” and “centre-margin” and to move beyond a
discourse of cultural containment towards a more radical engagement of
difference. The objective here is less to promote debates over polarized entities and
more to consider how the aesthetic and the political intersect in the study of literary
texts. Reading “in-between” the aesthetic and the political might enable teachers to

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INTRODUCTION

consider the fluid boundaries of culture, race and subjugated knowledges. This
form of reading might also avoid over-simplications about cultural difference and
plurality in reading practices. As Dimitriadis and McCarthy (2001) suggest,
Thinking in postcolonial terms about the topic of difference and multiplicity
in education means thinking relationally and contextually. It means bringing
back into educational discourses all those tensions and contradictions that we
tend to suppress as we process experience and history into curricular
knowledge. (p. 119)
These tensions and contradictions may erupt as teachers and students encounter
historical inequities on the bases of race, class and gender as valid topics of
discussion in the English classroom alongside the literary analysis of texts.
Teachers’ attention to considerations of historical and material contexts
surrounding a text allows for contemporary problems of political, social and
cultural domination to enter the classroom debates alongside discussions of literary
allusions, foreshadowing, metaphor and metonymy.
Postcolonialism also challenges any easy understandings of the aftermath of
empire and the colonial encounter as it exposes the problematics of literary
production within the economies of the international marketplace, and brings to light
what Deepika Bahri (1997) has termed “the functional economy and orientation of
the postcolonial text” (p. 285). These issues, she claims, “are at least as important for
pedagogy as they are for postcolonial theory” (p. 285). Teachers discussing a
postcolonial text in the classroom might show how postcolonial writers are striving
to write back against the centre. At the same time, they could begin to analyze with
their students how and why such authors are writing in the former colonizers’
language, being marketed for, and read by Western academia and rewarded by
international literary prizes from the West. As Bahri (1997) explains:
The postcolonial intersects with the complex functioning of the educational
institution within a larger context: the world, the text, the critic…and the
teacher and students…. That these sets are also dynamic rather than static
makes it the more difficult to discern their boundaries. (p. 281)
Such complex intersections might also include deconstructing literary texts that have
achieved particular canonical status within Western schools in an effort to understand
how such texts have been normalized in the classroom and read in particular ways. In
addition, one could introduce texts that students and teachers might not have
traditionally engaged with in classroom settings in order to understand how
traditional reading and teaching practices can be challenged by the texts themselves.
In this book, we focus predominantly on postcolonial texts and postcolonial
reading practices while acknowledging the slipperiness of distinctions between texts
that can be considered ‘postcolonial’ and those that would fall into the category of
‘multicultural.’ All the case studies discussed in this book explore the engagement of
readers with postcolonial and multicultural literary texts with an appeal for
adolescent readers. We understand these texts to include a range of literary genres
that overtly or implicitly address issues of culture, race, ethnicity, gender, class,

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 READING PRACTICES

nationality, sexual orientation, power and marginalization. We work from the

premise that both multicultural and postcolonial texts may take up historical
perspectives, challenge notions of normativity, or critique understandings of so-
called “authentic identities”. The discourse of multiculturalism, however, is often
framed in terms of liberal humanist perspectives which celebrate tolerance,
understanding, plurality and diversity. In contrast, postcolonial discourses address
specific historical colonial legacies and the tensions that emerge from cultural
difference. Postcolonial literatures, which encompass a huge variety of international
writing, attempt to challenge the dominant literary and cultural discourses of the west
and to critique the discursive and material legacies of colonization.
Based on our experiences as classroom teachers, university teacher educators
and researchers interested in questions of literature, pedagogy and identity, we
have come to understand that in reading, both meaning and identity can only be
produced through a dialogic process that is both ambivalent and active. Here, we
draw on the work of Homi Bhabha (1994) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), who
advance theories of meaning and identity production that depend on dynamic
interactions between individuals and texts. For these theorists, it is the areas
between reader and text, individual and culture, where significant understanding
can take place. Investigating the relationship between cultural identity and the
ways in which it affects one’s reading of culturally diverse texts offers glimpses
into this space of the convergence and interrogation of identity, culture and
literature. While Bhabha and Bakhtin both underpin their ideas in different ways,
both reflect on the significance of liminal spaces in which readers negotiate their
engagement with texts.
Bhabha (1994), in The Location of Culture, highlights the concept of a Third
Space in the process of interpretation:
The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between
the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning
requires that these two places be mobilized in the passage through a Third
Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the
specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional
strategy of which it cannot ‘in itself’ be conscious. (p. 36)
This negotiation of meaning, according to Bhabha, is often unconscious,
encompassing all the cultural signifiers and discourses resonant in the text read
through particular and personal frames of reference.
Bakhtin also sees reading as a negotiation that takes place between a reader, a text
and a larger cultural milieu. In his view, readers are “social subjects whose ‘personal
responses’ are the result of their unique history of experiences in the world as literate,
social beings” (Dressman, 2004, p. 48). For Bakhtin, language is always dialogic and
always emerges within a social context. Erin Manning (2003) explains further that:
Dialogy conceives knowing as the effort of understanding ‘the active
reception of the speech of the other’ (Bakhtin, 1973, p. 113)…. By critically
combining time, space, and alterity, Bakhtin places the content of cultural

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INTRODUCTION

expression into a context from whence a cultural manifestation cannot be

definitively located solely in aesthetic terms, but must, rather, be
reencountered within a social and political setting. (p. 13-14)
The following chapters are framed by these understandings of liminality and
dialogy articulated by Bhabha and Bakhtin. They are also informed by the work of
theorists and educators who share these perspectives and are concerned about
emerging challenges and complex issues raised by literature, culture and pedagogy.
In addition, each of the chapters is directly informed by the research we have
conducted with high school teachers, students and undergraduate pre-service
teachers. These studies highlight possibilities for readers to engage with literary
texts that are culturally distant from their own experiences in a range of social and
pedagogical contexts.

CHAPTER OVERVIEWS

Chapter One: “Reading Myself, Reading the Other: Adolescents Interrogating a

Postcolonial Text” discusses a study in which 10 high school students were asked
to read a short story, “The Management of Grief,” by the Indian-born American
author, Bharati Mukherjee. The story alludes to the 1985 terrorist bombing of Air
India Flight 182 but, in effect, it interrogates the inadequacies of official policies of
multiculturalism and pluralism in coping with a domestic tragedy that is
“fundamentally an immigration tragedy with terrorist overtones” (Blaise &
Mukherjee, 1987, p. ix). The focus of this chapter is on the responses of the
students to questions of representation and stereotyping, particularly in relation to
the one white character in the text. We discuss the responses of the students from
European backgrounds to the culturally specific references in the story and the
concerns expressed by students of East Indian backgrounds about how the story
positions them in the eyes of their classmates. Ultimately, this study reinforces the
value that culturally proximate reading has for students, especially for those who
are unaccustomed to seeing their experiences reflected in school literature. This
study also emphasizes the potential richness of a reading that repositions, as Other,
students who are accustomed to seeing themselves reflected in the cultural
mainstream.
Chapter Two: “Truth or Lie: Students Reading the Indeterminacies of an
Aboriginal Auto/Biographical Text” explores responses of a class of grade 11 (16
year-old) students to reading Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), a
collaborative telling of Yvonne Johnson’s life experiences mediated by her co-
author, Rudy Wiebe. Our discussion focuses on the following aspects of students’
responses: their discomfort with and questioning of the ‘truth’ of the story as
narrated by the two authors; their attempts to understand the circular structure of ‘a
traditional tribal narrative’ (Gunn Allen, 1986, p. 79) with non-linear time
sequencing and a shifting sense of space in depicting the crime scenes; and, their
efforts to position themselves within the cultural and political dimensions of a
narrative from which they felt culturally dislocated but morally implicated.

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We also explore the particular pedagogical challenges and possibilities that

Stolen Life presents as a “teaching text.” The classroom teacher wanted to
“defamiliarize” her high school students’ preconceptions surrounding Aboriginal
peoples in their community by asking them to read a non-fiction work that
remained faithful to an oral storytelling tradition and opened up the tensions
between stereotypes and an individual’s experience.
Chapter Three: “Telling Too Much: Cultural Translation in African Novels for
Adolescent Readers” explores the responses of adolescent readers in a high school
classroom to reading the first chapters of three African novels. One young adult
novel, Nancy Farmer’s A Girl Named Disaster (1996) offers a culturally mediated
text that consciously explicates “Shona culture” for adolescent Western readers. In
contrast, Buchi Emecheta in The Bride Price (1976) and Richard Rive in
‘Buckingham Palace’: District Six (1986) write from within the cultural
experiences they describe and take for granted that readers will bring their own
understandings to the texts. Adolescent readers in this study did not perceive
themselves as culturally alienated from the Emecheta and Rive texts. Rather than
feeling themselves as dislocated readers of unfamiliar cultural texts, they saw these
excerpts as sites of cultural exploration and learning. Our study suggests that
students are not necessarily alienated when they read cross-cultural texts in which
they may not be the intended audience and they prefer not to have every cultural
reference “translated” for them. Students indicated that they had found themselves
resisting the explicit didacticism they encountered in Farmer’s text that was
consciously mediated for Western audiences.
These adolescent readers demonstrated an awareness of how authorial voice
both obscures and illuminates questions of culture and “authenticity”. Although the
students were relatively inexperienced readers, they nevertheless were able to
articulate the ambiguities and tensions in how the themes of the books can be
undermined or reinforced by the cultural markers implicit in their writing.
Chapter Four: “Outside the Comfort Zone: Developing Postcolonial Reading
Practices in the English Classroom” offers reflections on two collaborative
research studies in which pre-service and practicing teachers read and discussed
postcolonial texts suitable for adolescent readers in their classrooms. These
included literary works by Rosario Ferré (1994), Ha Jin (2000), Naguib Mahfouz
(1994), V.S. Naipaul (1992) and Jhumpa Lahiri (1999). In addition to selected
literary texts, the teachers explored the potential and limitations of postcolonial and
multicultural rhetoric, curricula and activities for their own teaching. This chapter
focuses both on the discomforts that emerged between teachers’ professed beliefs
and their classroom practices, and on the possibilities for collaboratively
developing postcolonial reading practices.
It is clear from these studies that even when the impetus for curricular change is
strongly felt by practicing and beginning teachers, there needs to be long-term
support for these changes to effectively challenge the entrenched canon of Western
literature in Canadian schools today.
Chapter Five: “National Identity and the Ideology of Canadian Multicultural
Picture Books: Pre-service Teachers Encountering Representations of Difference,”

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INTRODUCTION

co-authored with Joyce Bainbridge and Rochelle Skogen, explores the responses
and understandings of pre-service English language arts teachers at one Alberta
university to a range of contemporary Canadian picture books. Our study found
that most of these 40 student teachers had little experience reading picture books
that offer a variety of representations and portrayals of Canada’s diversity, and had
not considered the potential for the use of such picture books in their classrooms.
In our chapter we explore the following major themes that emerged from these
participants’ responses to the texts: considering the pedagogy of picture books;
perceiving oneself as ‘Canadian’; imagining the ‘Other’; and exploring
controversial issues in picture books. We concluded that for these pre-service
teachers, encounters with difference, even in seemingly simple literary texts, can
be fraught with tensions related to notions of identity, disability, culture, race,
gender and sexuality.
Following the five chapters, a brief “Afterwords” offers reflections on further
possibilities for ways to mediate difference in print and media texts for
contemporary school students and for literature teachers.

REFERENCES

Bahri, D. (1997). “Marginally Off-Center: Postcolonialism in the Teaching Machine.” College English, 59,
(3): pp. 277–298
Bender-Slack, D. A. (2010). “Texts, Talk… and Fear? English Language Arts Teachers Negotiate Social
Justice Teaching”. English Education, 42(2): pp. 181–203.
Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. In M. Holquist, C. Emerson & M.
Holquist (Eds.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Blaise, C. & Mukherjee, B. (1987). The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India
Tragedy. Markham, ON: Viking Penguin.
Britzman, D. P., K. A. Santiago-Valles, G. M. Jiménez-Muñoz & Laura L. (1993). “Slips That Show and
Tell: Fashioning Multiculture as a Problem of Representation.” In Race, Identity and Representation in
Education, C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.) pp.188–200. New York: Routledge.
Dimitriadis, G. & C. McCarthy. (2001) Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial. New York & London:
Teachers’ College Press.
Dressman, M. (2004). “Dewey and Bakhtin in Dialogue: From Rosenblatt to a Pedagogy of Literature as
Social, Aesthetic Practice.” In A. F, Ball & S. W. Freedman (Eds.) Bakhtinian Perspectives on
Language, Literacy, and Learning. pp. 34–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Emecheta, B. (1976). The Bride Price. New York: George Braziller.
Farmer, N. (1996). A Girl Named Disaster. New York: Puffin.
Ferré, R. (1993). “The Youngest Doll.” In A. Applebee & J. Langer (Eds.). Multicultural Perspectives. pp.
274–280. Evanston, Il: McDougal, Littell.
Grobman, L. (2007). Multicultural Hybridity: Transforming American Literary Scholarship & Pedagogy.
Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.
Gunn Allen, P. (1986) The Sacred Hoop. Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Jin, H. (2000). The Bridegroom. New York: Vintage.
Johnston, I. (2003). “Reading and Resisting Spaces of Whiteness in High School Texts.” In E. Hasebe-
Ludt & W. Hurren, (Eds.). Curriculum Intertext: Place, Language, Pedagogy, pp. 227–238. New York:
Peter Lang.

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Lahiri, J. (1999). “The Third and Final Continent.” In Interpreter of Maladies. pp. 173–198. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Larsen, S. F. & János L. (1990). “Cultural-Historical Knowledge and Personal Experience in Appreciation
of Literature.” The European Journal of Social Psychology, 20: pp. 425–440.
Mahfouz, N. (1994). “Half a day.” In C. McClymont, P. O’Rourke, J. Prest, P. Prest & G. Sorestad.
Something to Declare: Selections from International Literature, pp. 3-6. Toronto: Oxford University
Press.
Mishra, V. & Bob H. (1991). “What is Post(-) Colonialism?” Textual Practice, 5(3): pp.399–414.
Mukherjee, B. (1988). “The Management of Grief.” In The Middleman and Other Stories. pp. 179–197.
New York: Grove.
Manning, E. (2003) Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Naipaul, V. S. (1992) “B. Wordsworth.” In J. Barry & J. Griffin (Eds.). The Storyteller: Short Stories from
Around the World. pp. 145–151.Toronto: Nelson Canada.
Quayson, A. (2001). Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rive, R. (1986). ‘Buckingham Palace’: District Six. Cape Town: David Philip.
Wiebe, R. H. & Yvonne J. (1998). Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto: A. A. Knopf
Canada.

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 CHAPTER 1

SPACES OF IMPACT: ADOLESCENTS

INTERROGATING A STORY OF THE AIR INDIA
BOMBING

To enter into the postcolonial world is to see cultural relations at a global

level, to understand the complexities of the histories and power relations which
operate across continents. (Sherry Simon and Paul St-Pierre, 2000, p. 13)
“The Management of Grief,” a short story by Bharati Mukherjee (1988), was
published as part of the collection The Middleman and Other Stories. These stories
epitomize North America’s new “middlemen,” the “not-quites” who must
negotiate “between two modes of knowledge” (p. 189). The story we are
discussing here concerns the effects of the 1985 Air India bombing by Sikh
terrorists on Toronto’s Indian community and specifically on the central character
and narrator, Mrs. Shaila Bhave, who loses her husband and two sons in the crash.
The narrator appears to be coping well with the tragedy and is asked by a
government social worker, Judith Templeton, “to help as an intermediary—or, in
official Ontario Ministry of Citizenship terms, a ‘cultural interpreter’—between the
bereaved immigrant communities and the social service agencies” (Bowen, 1997,
p. 48).
In this chapter, we explore the spatial, cultural and temporal disruptions that
resonate from the story and the real life events surrounding the Air India plane
crash. We ground our discussion in a study that explored the responses of ten high
school readers, five Indo-Canadian and five Euro-Canadian students, who read the
story fifteen years after the actual event. We consider how the story and the event
function as spaces of impact in the context of Canada’s official multiculturalism,
exposing and revealing the disruptions between public policy and the lived realities
of Canada’s diasporic peoples.
The story is about a very specific event in Canadian culture; but it may also be
about an event specific to a Canadian culture. In The Sorrow and the Terror: The
Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, Clark Blaise and Bharati Mukherjee
(1987) tell us that they “saw it then, and see it now, as fundamentally an immigration
tragedy with terrorist overtones” (p. ix). Mukherjee (1997) explains that
in 1985 a terrorist bomb, planted in an Air-India jet on Canadian soil, blew
up after leaving Montreal, killing 329 passengers, most of whom were
Canadians of Indian origin. The prime minister of Canada at the time, Brian
Mulroney, phoned the prime minister of India to offer Canada’s condolences
for India’s loss. (para. 13)

1
CHAPTER 1

Despite the fact that this bombing was Canada’s largest mass murder, this attitude
that the tragedy constituted an “Indian problem” persisted in Canada until well into
the twenty-first century. Ironically, the human impact of the crash resonated more
deeply in Ireland, the literal space of impact, than it did in Canada. Only since a
criminal trial revealed the extent of the incompetence of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police in investigating the alleged perpetrators have public attitudes
changed significantly. The trial judge delivered a verdict of not guilty based on the
evidence presented, but he also made it clear that this evidence and the
investigation were deeply flawed. As a result of public outrage, an official inquiry
was set in place to review the process of the investigation. Increased media
coverage, the events of September 11, 2001, the political commitment of surviving
family members, changing notions of who counts as “Canadian” and genuine anger
at systemic injustices surrounding the tragedy have reignited interest in the Air
India bombing.

THE TEXT

However fascinating the real life events surrounding the tragedy itself, Mukherjee
makes it clear that in “The Management of Grief” she does not intend to “[reduce] art
to sociological statement,” (Chen and Goudie, 1997, para. 22) explaining that “no
fine fiction, no good literature, is anchored in verisimilitude. Fiction must be
metaphor. It is not transcription of real life but it’s a distillation and pitching at a
higher intensification of life” (para. 36). What Mukherjee does distill in this story are
her perspectives on official Canadian multiculturalism, against which she has
“spoken so vociferously” (para. 56). Mukherjee spent fifteen years in Canada; then in
the early 1980s, dissatisfied with her experiences with Canadian multiculturalism,
she and her family moved to the United States. Mukherjee (1997) explains that
Canadian official rhetoric designated me as one of the ‘visible minority’
who, even though I spoke the Canadian languages of English and French,
was straining ‘the absorptive capacity’ of Canada. Canadians of color were
routinely treated as ‘not real’ Canadians. (para. 8)
Given Mukherjee’s strong views on ethnicity in Canada, it is interesting to
consider her perceived status as an “ethnic writer” in North America. Her
resistance to this designation raises questions similar to those posed by Wil M.
Verhoven (1996) when he asks, “What exactly makes ‘ethnic writing’ ethnic? Is
there such a thing as ‘ethnic writing’? If so, to what extent can an ‘ethnic’ writer be
expected to write ‘ethnically’? (p. 100)
If such questions might be asked about writing, might not the same questions be
raised about reading? Is there such a thing as ‘ethnic reading’? If so, to what extent
can an ‘ethnic’ reader be expected to read ‘ethnically’? Since we were most
interested in the personal responses of students to the story and the ways in which
they came to an interpretation of the text’s meaning for themselves, these questions
provided a useful starting point for thinking about questions of literature, response
and culture. In much the same way that Shaila, the story’s protagonist, acts as a

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“cultural translator” between various members of Toronto’s Indian community and

the government of Ontario, readers of the story act as translators between the
culture of the story and their own cultural background.

THE RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS

In this small case study, the ten students interviewed about their responses to
reading “The Management of Grief” were grade eleven and twelve students who
attended two different high schools (situated in one school district) located in
“Marysville,” Alberta. We chose five students of European heritage and five of
Indian heritage; all of the students, with the exception of one of the European-
Canadian boys, were raised in Marysville. The students, four boys and six girls,
were all strong readers and were enrolled in International Baccalaureate programs
or Advanced Placement English. In addition to being academically successful,
each of these students was heavily involved in extracurricular activities within his
or her school community, including students' council, leadership, sports and fine
arts. Ultimately, we hoped to select students with similar academic
backgrounds,with the significant variable being that of cultural background.
Finding five students of East Indian background in Marysville was somewhat
difficult, since, as one of the interviewees commented, "Marysville is so not
culturally diverse." However, with the help of teachers at two local high schools,
we were able to locate five volunteers. While these Indo-Canadian students shared
much in common, they also presented a number of interesting differences. All were
raised in Marysville and were strong, highly social students; however, their
backgrounds, while all "Indian" to some extent, were also quite diverse.
The students of European background proved to be no less diverse than their
Indo-Canadian counterparts. These students were also raised in Marysville (with
the exception of Alex, who, between the ages of ten and sixteen, lived in England).
Again, these students were academically motivated and socially active in their
schools. When we asked the student volunteers to tell us about their cultural
backgrounds, none of the students of European heritage provided any information
on religious affiliations, while each participant of Indian background included
reference to religion in relation to culture. The pseudonyms chosen for the students
involved in this study reflect their real names to the extent that, especially for the
Indo-Canadian students, we have attempted to maintain a connection to their
specific cultural heritages. For example, Theresa's real name is Christian rather
than Hindu and we have maintained that distinction here.

Table 1. Students of Indian Heritage

Meena: 16, Female, south Indian, Hindu

Theresa: 17, Female, south Indian-Sri Lankan, Christian
Simi: 16, Female, north Indian, Hindu
Raj: 18, Male, Indo-Fijian, Hindu
Salim: 17, Male, Indo-Ugandan, Muslim

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Table 2. Students of European Heritage

Joanne: 17, Female, Scandinavian

Mary: 17, Female, Scottish
Kristine: 16, Female, Norwegian-Sioux
Alex: 17, Male, Scandinavian
Colin: 17, Male, British-Scandinavian

Only one of these ten students, Meena, had any real awareness of the 1985 Air
India bombing, and this surprised us somewhat. We had assumed that, despite the
fact that most of these students would have been only two or three years old at the
time, the Indo-Canadian students, in particular, would still know something about
this event. However, the majority had only the vaguest recollection of the tragedy
until we provided them with some background. Interestingly, in the years since this
study was conducted, the coverage in the media of the legal events surrounding
this case has been significant. In 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an
inquiry into the investigation of the bombing, which was marred by a variety of
errors and incompetency on the part of various law enforcement agencies. In 2010,
Prime Minister Harper formally issued an apology to the families of the victims as
a result of the “damning indictment” as expressed in the final report of the inquiry.
At the time of our study, despite the fact that most did not have any background
knowledge about the disaster, all the students in the study expressed interest in
reading “The Management of Grief” and, in their interviews, commented
particularly on characterization, cultural context, setting and language use in the
story. Our analysis of audio-recorded interviews with students focuses particularly
on contrasting cultural viewpoints of the story as expressed by the Indo-Canadian
students and the Euro-Canadian students.

JUDITH TEMPLETON: “THE ICON OF WHITE”

In “The Management of Grief,” Judith Templeton is “an appointee of the

provincial government,” whose “mandate is bigger” than multiculturalism
(Mukherjee, 1988, p. 182). She arrives within days of the bombing to elicit the
help of the narrator, Mrs. Shaila Bhave, in negotiating “the complications of
culture, language, and customs” that are associated with the tragedy (p. 183). By
way of explanation, Judith Templeton explains to Mrs. Bhave that:
There are hundreds of people in Metro [Toronto] directly affected, like you,
and some of them speak no English. There are some widows who’ve never
handled money or gone on a bus, and there are old parents who still haven’t
eaten or gone outside of their bedrooms. Some houses and apartments have
been looted. Some wives are still hysterical. Some husbands are in shock and
profound depression. We want to help, but our hands are tied in so many
ways. We have to distribute money to some people, and there are legal
documents—these things can be done. We have interpreters, but we don’t
always have the human touch, or maybe the right human touch. We don’t

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want to make mistakes, Mrs. Bhave, and that’s why we’d like to ask you to
help us.’ (p. 183)
The students’ responses to this character, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed government
social worker, were quite clearly split along cultural lines. The Indo-Canadian
students generally found Judith to be quite unsympathetic. Meena begins her
comments by saying sarcastically:
• It seemed like she was, oh, ‘the kind Canadian lady just trying to help out
everyone.’ She said all the…government wants to do is give these people
money and they’re too stubborn to accept it. I don’t really agree with that very
much because they’re portraying her in a way like the government is just being
so…kind of…being so nice to people but actually a lot of bigotry went along
with this bombing. There was a lot of racism surrounding it…the way the Indian
community was portrayed on the news and stuff wasn’t very respectful.
This dissatisfaction with the character of the “kind Canadian lady” is expressed
more emotionally in Theresa’s comment:
• It made me cry…it wasn’t so much that it was about death…like that was sad,
but this is going to sound strange…but you know [Judith] and how she’s not
necessarily racist, but she’s so almost like, ignorant of culture and other
peoples’ culture…I don’t know, but I’ve never encountered racism directly, but
you still kind of feel it. I don’t know, but that just kind of hit.
Simi articulates a sense of ambivalence about the dissonance between the
character’s motives and the reality of her methods:
• [The story] made it seem like [Judith] was so good…made it seem like she was
only trying to help, but she didn’t really know anything about the situation. I
didn’t really know what to think of her.
The two Indo-Canadian boys, Raj and Salim, both echoed Meena and Simi with
their observations:
• Raj: At first I thought she was a nice person and just trying to help, but after
reading what that old couple said…you don’t want help from other people, you
support your family…and how she kept persisting on them to do it [sign the
power of attorney papers], I kind of started getting mad. Like, let them live their
life the way they want. I don’t think it’s her place to go in to somebody and say
you have to sign this to make your life better. How does she know it will make
their life better and not worse?
• Salim: She tried to help them, but she didn’t respect their need for closure, I
guess, their own way to grieve. It was like she wanted to pay them off or
something… It’s like she’s using [Shaila’s] nationality.
These students appear to be unwilling to excuse Judith’s ignorance in the name of
her benevolence despite acknowledging the difficulty of her task.

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In contrast, many of the Euro-Canadian students, even while recognizing her

problematic status within the story, appeared to empathize with Judith’s
predicament. Joanne comments:
• She had good intentions I think…she was trying hard to do in her mind what
would be the best for these people, but I think that the cultural differences were
just so great that she didn’t do a very good job of it at all. She insulted her
[Shaila] when [Shaila] got out of the car and walked away and…she totally
couldn’t connect with the old lady and the old man. Like nothing she could
say…like they were on two different wavelengths. Right, so, she was nice
and…I kind of empathized with her…‘cause she tried so hard but she just
couldn’t connect at all.
And Alex, despite observing that Judith “totally represented cultural ignorance,”
went on to reveal a more personal response to Judith’s actions:
• I’m sure her heart was in the right place…what she was doing was trying to
make these people’s lives better, but she didn’t ever try to step out of her own
little viewpoint and realize that there might be other viewpoints around…If you
look at all the major colonial instances in history it’s always been the colonizer
coming in and saying ‘these people are wrong. We have to educate them, we
have to conform them to what’s good.’ She obviously was [doing] that but I
don’t think it was intended…I can possibly understand how that would happen.
I’m sure I’ve been guilty of it lots, too. I’m sure I offended hundreds of people
in my old school because of my own viewpoints and how I don’t really think
about stuff.
Mary’s response indicates a genuine confusion about Shaila’s motives towards the
end of the story. She says,
• I don’t know why Shaila got so mad at her. Judith just seemed like she wanted
to help. I can understand how she might have been pushing that old couple too
hard, but I don’t know why Shaila would have gotten out of the car. That lady
was just trying to help.
Even Kristine and Colin, with their own interesting relationships with
multiculturalism in Canada, responded with some measures of empathy toward
Judith:
• Kristine: I can understand why, being white, she would want someone of that
cultural background to help.
• Colin: I still see Judith as being representative of white people. And I think it’s
fair because she’s really well meaning, but she’s totally off base.
Most of the students of European heritage responded to the ambiguity of
Judith’s position within the story. Even without any significant historical context
other than that provided by the story itself, they recognized that, despite her good
intentions, Judith’s assumptions about Shaila and the Sikh couple were
inappropriate. Judith appears to be unaware that it is insensitive to ask Shaila, as a

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Hindu woman whose husband and two daughters were victims of the “Sikh bomb,”
to help an elderly Sikh couple who have lost their own grown sons in the same
terrorist act. Shaila cautions Judith by saying:
‘They are Sikh. They will not open up to a Hindu woman.’ And what I want
to add is, as much as I try not to, I stiffen now at the sight of beards and
turbans. I remember a time when we all trusted each other in this new
country, it was only the new country we worried about. (p. 193)
Judith is oblivious to the nuances of culture and religion, which left our Euro-
Canadian students with the following perceptions:
• Joanne: She thought her way was the only way that was going to get things
resolved, so she could have been more open to different possibilities.
Obviously, if it wasn’t working she should have tried different things.
• Alex: Like she didn’t ever try to say ‘why don’t these people want it? What’s
going on in their minds, what makes them click that way?’ Instead, she was like,
they’re obviously wrong…She doesn’t perceive the difference between Hindu
and Sikh. She’s like, ‘here, you’re that type. Talk to them for me because I’m
not that type. I’m not your kind.’
• Kristine: I thought it was a horrible thing to do…when Judith asks Shaila to
help with the Sikh people, I thought that was really insensitive because she just
lost her whole family in that plane crash. And she never even thought enough to
realize that just because they’re from the same country…there are different
cultures. Shaila even told her, ‘they’re not going to talk to me. I can’t help
them.’ And she couldn’t understand that.
• Colin: I kind of have to see Judith as the icon of white…that’s how white people
treat everybody. And that’s as good as at it gets. It gets a lot worse, but that’s as
good as it gets…and that’s the way white Western people go somewhere to help out
the ‘savages’ and when they want to be nice about it then that’s how they treat them.
If they don’t want to be nice about it, it’s something else. They’re very
condescending, as though getting along for thousands of years must have just been a
fluke. So, if that’s the intent, then it was a fair representation, if Judith was that.
Colin’s somewhat cautious suggestion that perhaps Judith symbolically functions
as the personification of Canadian official multiculturalism echoes Mukherjee’s
(1988) assertion that “Canada is a country officially hostile to the concept of
assimilation…[it is] a comfortable but unwelcoming environment” (p. 1). In
response to Judith, the official government representative, each participant in the
study recognized, however cloaked by “niceness,” the element of hypocrisy that
Mukherjee clearly feels is an element of contemporary Canadian society.

CULTURAL PROXIMITY AND DISTANCE

One of our original research questions was whether readers who share a “cultural
proximity” to a text read a literary work significantly differently than those who
are more “culturally distant” from the same text (Larsen and László, 1990, p. 428).

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We began each interview by asking the student volunteer to discuss his or her
general response to the story. Their answers to this request provide some insight
into questions of proximity and distance. Here, responses were split along cultural
lines: the Indo-Canadian students were personally and emotionally engaged by the
cultural specificity of the story. Their responses focussed on the appreciation of
their unaccustomed positioning as “insiders” to the culture of the story. In contrast,
the Euro-Canadian students generally regarded the culturally specific details with a
detached “outsiders’” curiosity, and most of these students began their initial
commentary on the story by referring to elements they did not understand or about
which they had questions.Simi’s reaction is somewhat illustrative of the other
students of Indian heritage. She says,
• I don’t know if it was just me, but it was so weird for me to read this story
because I think that I would have such a different opinion of this story than
someone else. I think that someone from here who had lived here all their life
that had no connection with Indian roots, no matter what culture they were, if
they read this story, I don’t think it would hit them the way it hit me. Because I
can relate to it. I’m like, what if that was my family that was on that plane and
nobody cared? Like, I can relate. Whereas someone from here would be like no,
my family wouldn’t be going to India on an Air India flight.
Another student, Salim, revealed that he “liked how [he] could relate to stuff
more…[he] knew what she was talking about, like the words she uses.” While all
of the Indo-Canadian students suggested that they felt close to the text because of a
variety of cultural resonances— partly due to Mukherjee’s use of Hindi words
throughout—some did express reservations about the possibility that the story
could be taken as “representative” of “the Indo-Canadian experience.” Mukherjee
herself has explored this troublesome prospect, clarifying that
We’re very, very different kinds of Indians. Simply because of skin color and
South Asian ancestry, the non-South Asian is likely to lump us together…as
a writer, my job is to open up, to discover and say ‘we are all individuals.’ In
fiction we are writing about individuals; none of them is meant to be a crude
spokesperson for whole groups, whether those groups are based on gender or
race or class. (Chen and Goudie, 1996, para. 12)
Interestingly, none of the Euro-Canadian students we interviewed identified this
potential for seeing a character as “a crude spokesperson” as an issue of concern.
Their initial responses to the story were somewhat removed and intellectualised, in
contrast to the more personal reactions of the Indo-Canadian students. For
example, Alex responded that he thought the story “was more like an examination,
in terms of exploring cultures, lifestyles, and ways of thinking.” Mary, in an
unconscious affirmation of Simi’s suggestion that a non-Indian reader might not
relate to the “culture” surrounding an Air India flight, said: “I thought it was weird
that there were so many connected people on the same flight.”With these
revelations and their somewhat ‘anthropological’ initial approach to the story, it is
fair to say that the “culturally distant” Euro-Canadian students did, in fact, read

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“The Management of Grief” significantly differently than their Indo-Canadian

counterparts.
We draw on the work of Larsen and Seilman (1988) to reflect on how the
development of an understanding and appreciation of a literary text depends partly
on readers’ application of specific knowledge drawn from personally experienced,
autobiographical memories. These evocations may be consciously mobilized
during the process of reading. Thus, the concept of “personal resonance,” defined
as “pieces of self-knowledge activated by cues from the text,” relates to the
reader’s personal knowledge and history in the creation of meaning (p. 417). The
evocation of such responses signifies that “some personal concerns are becoming
involved” and suggests that the reader is able to appreciate the literature by
forming a more personal and deeper understanding of it (p. 418). These resonances
imply a negotiation of meaning reminiscent of Bhabha’s ‘Third space’ in which
some level of appreciation and understanding beyond the literal occurs. It is
therefore not too surprising that the students of Indo-Canadian heritage could draw
upon their own backgrounds in ways that the students of Euro-Canadian heritage
could not. Larsen and László (1990) explain,
Readers must construct for themselves an understanding of the imaginary
world with which the text deals…however, [this explanation] seems
insufficient to account for the fact that different readers, even with similar
cultural background and present circumstances, may react very differently to
a given work—and that the same person may react differently at different
times. (p. 426-427)
In order to account for these individual and varied reading experiences, Larsen and
László go on to suggest that
To understand a text about a universe of discourse…highly specific to a
certain culture and historical period, the reader has to call upon his or her
knowledge and experiences with that kind of cultural and historical
setting…[and]—culturally proximate readers—will thus be reminded of
more concrete events, and in particular, of a larger proportion of personally
experienced events than readers who are unfamiliar with the setting and
events of the story (culturally distant readers). (p. 428)
These “remindings vary in their degree of personal relevance” and are related to
the resonance a reader might feel while engaging with a text (p. 428). These
notions of proximity and distance did seem to be at work for the participants in our
study. When asked if there were aspects of the story that they found difficult to
identify with, all of the Euro-Canadian students referred to the tension Shaila, a
Hindu, experiences at the end of the story when she and Judith Templeton visit the
Sikh couple. These students were aware that they were missing details about the
interaction between the characters, but they were unable to construct a satisfactory
explanation from the contextual information embedded within the text. None of
these students was aware of the religious conflicts that plagued India in the 1980s
and which made their way to Canada via Air India Flight 182. The responses of the

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Euro-Canadian students to this question suggests that their historical and cultural
distance from the event being described denied them access to any possible
‘remindings’ to help them construct a personally relevant response to this aspect of
the story.
In contrast, none of the Indo-Canadian students in the study mentioned this
religious conflict as an obstacle to their understanding of the story. This lack of
notice suggests that perhaps, regardless of their current cultural reality, these
‘culturally proximate’ readers were able to call upon a variety of ‘reminded events’
in constructing their responses to this aspect of the text. Larsen and Lásló (1990)
state that “two categories of reminded events can be distinguished, representing
very different degrees of personal relevance: (1) events experienced personally by
the individual; and (2) events reported to the individual by others” (p. 428). Given
that all of the Indo-Canadian students involved in this study were raised in the
same suburban community, and that none of them revealed any instances of inter-
faith conflict, it is possible that the varying “degrees of personal relevance” they
experienced when they read “The Management of Grief” came about as a result of
‘reminded events’ they had experienced vicariously through others in the
community.
None of the Indo-Canadian participants offered any details from the story that
they found difficult to identify with, except that Salim “thought it was weird that
Shaila took Valium. Indian people don’t usually take medications like that.” This
somewhat offhand comment about “medications like that” did provide some
insight, however, into the effect on readers of cultural information embedded
within a text. Salim’s cultural proximity to the text allowed him to voice his
perceptions on a particular cultural view regarding mental health and his insight
into the actual success of Shaila’s ‘grief management.’ With his observation, Salim
revealed that, indeed, Shaila was not managing her grief very effectively by Indian
standards. This question of the impact of taken-for-granted cultural information
embedded within a text was especially appropriate for gaining an understanding of
the Indo-Canadian students’ responses. It also supported the notion that while the
Euro-Canadian students did miss several of the nuances within the story, they were
nevertheless able to engage in a “good enough” reading of the text (Mackey, 1996,
p. 91).
When we asked what they thought about Mukherjee’s use of Hindi words
throughout the story, the Indo-Canadian students revealed that they felt that their
readings were enriched by the fact that they could understand the other language of
the text. The Euro-Canadian students, however, did not appear to feel especially
‘dislocated’ by this same language use. They all explained that they were able to
figure out that the Hindi words Mukherjee used related to food, music or religion,
and they were satisfied with that knowledge. The notion of a “good enough”
reading of a culturally distant text is significant for teachers who teach literature
from other cultures; in the encounter with difference there is a space to honour the
diverse readings of a text offered by our students and to recognize that the
culturally proximate reader does not provide a ‘definitive’ understanding of a
work. Reed Way Dasenbrock (1992) reminds us that “[t]he informed position is

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not always the position of the richest or most powerful experience of a work of art”
(p. 39).
Thus far, our discussion of cultural proximity and distance to a text has implied
that those readers who are culturally ‘closer’ to a text will experience a more
informed reading than those who are more distant. For example, the Indo-Canadian
readers of “The Management of Grief” were able to identify with many of the
various cultural and linguistic references embedded within the story, while the
Euro-Canadian students were not. However, perhaps Meena’s and Simi’s readings
reveal how proximity to a text might act as a kind of obstacle to a reader’s
engagement with the story. These two girls appeared to read with a double
consciousness: on the one hand, they appreciated the story for its links with parts
of their identities not regularly affirmed by the mainstream culture; on the other
hand, their proximity to the culture of the story caused them to read with a
heightened awareness of how this culture was presented in the text. They were
concerned with stereotyping and the perceptions of India by ‘other’ readers and
this may have, in some ways, distanced them from the text. In contrast, the Euro-
Canadian students, with their distance from the story, were able to read less
‘sensitively.’ By being removed from the culture on display, these students were
able to be observers and to ask questions that would clarify their understandings of
the story. This shifting of what it means to be the ‘Other’ reader provided the Euro-
Canadian students with new perspectives on commonly held conceptions of centre
and periphery. As members of the cultural mainstream in Canada, most of these
Euro-Canadian students had rarely read literature from cultural heritages outside of
their own.
When asked which aspects of the text they found most compelling, all of the
participants in this study revealed that they were most affected by interactions
between characters and the varying ways in which they dealt with their grief.
Regardless of their cultural background, the participants in this study were most
deeply affected by the female characters who had lost family in the air disaster.
Judith Templeton also evoked strong responses from each of the readers,
regardless of whether they viewed her with sympathy or scorn.
The students were also empathetic to the scope of the tragedy and the possibility
of losing one’s entire family in one catastrophic event. All of the students
empathized with Shaila’s grief and almost all of the students saw the conclusion of
the story as optimistic. The story ends a number of months following the bombing
with Shaila walking in Toronto. She explains:
I heard the voices of my family one last time. Your time has come, they said.
Go, be brave. I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end. I do
not know which direction I will take. I dropped the package on a park bench
and started walking. (p. 197)
All of the students stated that they were pleased rather than frustrated by the
indeterminate ending of the story.
A number of more individual and even less generalizable revelations occurred
during the interview process. One such moment happened when we asked Salim,

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one of the Indo-Canadian students, whether there were details in the story with
which he particularly identified. He replied, “Yeah, the Stanley Cup. When we get
together in my family we all watch hockey.” Such moments serve as a reminder of
the unexpected and often unarticulated interactions between culture and text for
individual readers. We were also reminded that discussions of specific reading
experiences often reveal only a fraction of what is happening in those moments of
engagement between the reader and the text and then between the reader and the
researcher.
For teachers who choose to introduce literature that may be more culturally
proximate to some students than to others, these study findings serve to remind us
that while cultural proximity does make a significant difference in how students
negotiate their way through a text, their readings will remain individual and
particular. This study also reinforces the value of introducing diverse texts, not
only to students who might be culturally proximate to the literature they study, but
also to students who, in Dasenbrock’s terms might be ‘uninformed readers’ of
multicultural literature. In a similar vein, we were reminded that while we might
choose to teach ‘ethnic writing’ in our classes, there may not be such a thing as
‘ethnic reading.’
How authors and readers create meaning is necessarily different. Authors create
a text by distilling their influences and choices in order to construct the work that
they have conceived. Readers, however, approach a text with all of their
experiences, influences and “remindings,” which include, but are not limited to,
cultural background. To assume that an individual reader will respond to a
particular text based solely on his or her ethnicity is to limit the reading experience.
An author who chooses to write ‘ethnically’ does so largely by craft; for a reader to
do the same is quite a different matter. Readers will engage with any number and
combination of elements in a text and these connections are unpredictable. The
cultural markers chosen by an author are accepted as significant or glossed over as
mere detail according to who we are and the “remindings” we bring to the text.
Literature teachers in North America have more opportunities now for cross-
cultural teaching than they did in the past: new literatures in English and in
translation, combined with the increasing ethnic diversity of schools, provide
spaces for the interrogation of identity and its constructed-ness. Through literature,
students, regardless of their positioning in relation to the cultural mainstream, can
be encouraged to investigate many of the taken-for-granted assumptions about
culture and ethnicity that accompany current notions of Western multiculturalism.
The value of diverse literature for creating a sense of inclusiveness for minority
students is clear; however, the presence of the Other in literature, as well as in real
life, provides students who are part of the cultural mainstream with an opportunity
to negotiate their own understandings of culture and identity. Our study reinforces
the value that culturally proximate reading has for students, especially for those
who are unaccustomed to seeing their experiences reflected in school literature.
Reading a range of texts allows students from a variety of backgrounds to feel
‘proximate’ to some texts and ‘distant’ from others. By shifting the centre of
cultural proximity through choice of literature, students are afforded the

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 SPACES OF IMPACT

opportunity to experience multiple reading stances in relation to a text. Students

may experience potential richness of a reading that repositions them as Other,
particularly those who are accustomed to seeing themselves reflected in the
cultural mainstream. These students, when they leave the confines and security of
home, will find themselves exploring sites of negotiation and interrogation, and
perhaps their exposure to literature from other cultures can “transform [their] sense
of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces….” (Bhabha,
1994, p. 256).

REFERENCES

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Blaise, C. & Bharati M. (1987). The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India
Tragedy. Markham, ON: Viking Penguin.
Bowen, D. (1997). “Spaces of Translation: Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Management of Grief.’ ARIEL,
28(3): pp. 47–60.
Chen, T. & X.G. Sean. (1997). “Holders of the Word: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Jouvert,
1(1). Retrieved from, http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v1i1/BHARAT.HTM
Dasenbrock, R. W. (1992). “Teaching Multicultural Literature”. In Joseph Trimmer and Tilly
Warnock (Eds.), Understanding Others: Cultural and Cross-cultural Studies and the Teaching of
Literature, pp. 35–46. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Hancock, G. (1987). “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Canadian Fiction Magazine, 59: pp. 30–44.
Larsen, S. F. & S. Uffe. (1988). “Personal Remindings While Reading Literature.” Text 8, pp. 411–429.
Larsen, S. F. & L. János. (1990). “Cultural-historical Knowledge and Personal Experience in Appreciation
of Literature.” European Journal of Social Psychology, 20: pp. 425–440.
Mackey, M. (1996). “How Readers Come to Terms With the Unfamiliar: The Invisible Trajectory of
Individual Development.” Reader, 35/36: pp. 80–93.
Mukherjee, B. (1985). Darkness. Markham, ON: Penguin.
Mukherjee, B. (1988). “The Management of Grief.” In The Middleman and Other Stories, New York:
Grove, pp. 179–97
Mukherjee, B. (1997). “American Dreamer.” Mother Jones Magazine [Online], (January/February).
Retrieved from, http://mojones.com/motherjones/ JF97/mukherjee.htm
Simon, S. & P. St-Pierre. (2000) Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era. Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press.
Verhoven, W. M. (1996). “How Hyphenated Can You Get?: A Critique of Pure Ethnicity.” Mosaic, 29(3):
pp. 97–116.

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 CHAPTER 2

TRUTH OR LIE: STUDENTS READING THE

INDETERMINACIES OF AN ABORIGINAL
AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL TEXT

Another thing is that, as the Elders tell me, all that you have experienced you
must learn from, and the people who live the hardest lives can have the
greatest understandings and teachings to give others. So learn well, for the
sake of others. (Wiebe & Johnson, 1998, p. 439)

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, we explore questions of voice, veracity and subalternity in relation

to Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson’s text Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree
Woman. In particular, we consider how adolescent readers take up these issues as
they respond to their readings of the text in a high school classroom context.
Published in 1998, this award-winning controversial Canadian text deals with
the imprisonment of Yvonne Johnson, a Cree woman convicted of murder. The
book, mediated by the voice of Rudy Wiebe, a well-known Canadian literary
figure, delves into Johnson’s traumatic childhood and the circumstances leading up
to the murder. The text unflinchingly addresses the social context within which
Yvonne Johnson grew up, one marked by racism, poverty, addiction, violence, and
sexual abuse, all of which constitute the dominant stereotypes of Aboriginal life in
Canada.
The book, a graphic portrayal of abuse, alcoholism, violence, and injustice, is
nevertheless infused with hope and spirituality. Johnson, while in prison, asked
Wiebe to write her story because she was impressed by his account of her great-
great-grandfather Big Bear in Wiebe’s book, The Temptations of Big Bear (1995).
Wiebe drew material for Stolen Life from newspaper and court records,
conversations with Johnson’s father and other family members, her own writings,
and in-person interviews with Yvonne. As Wiebe explains, “this book is based on
what Yvonne Johnson holds to be her own truths about the life she has lived”
(Wiebe and Johnson, 1998, p. xi). The result is a graphic and evocative telling of
her life and journey. According to Ervin Beck (2001), her willingness to take
responsibility for her life’s journey makes the telling especially poignant:
All of the negative Indian stereotypes are present in her biography:
alcoholism, drug abuse, welfare dependency, homelessness, sexual
promiscuity, [and] physical and sexual abuse, including incest. She refrains

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CHAPTER 2

from self-pity, taking full responsibility for her life. Elements of social
protest are nevertheless important in the book, as one sees Yvonne
victimized by both white society and her own family and friends. (p. 868)
Despite its harrowing nature, Johnson’s life story is suffused with spiritualism and
reconciliation, culminating in her newly discovered Cree identity and the spiritual
awareness that it includes:
I was in the Shaking Tent ceremony and I was told that my life was hard, and
it would remain so. I was told to keep seeking, I was told you do not give
your pain to the spirit world, you must give your pain away. Does that mean
share it somehow? I do not know how to do this. I ponder how to give birth
to myself, in a spiritual sense. (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998, p. 438)

WHAT KIND OF TEXT IS THIS?

At first glance, Stolen Life appears to be a co-authored biography of Yvonne

Johnson following in the tradition of sensational life stories told with the help of a
“professional” writer. However, it is immediately evident in this text that the
relationship between the two authors is far more complex than that of subject and
scribe. One of the central issues of the text is that of voice. Throughout her life,
Johnson was silenced by a series of circumstances: her cleft palate that kept her
silent as a child, the unspeakable cycle of physical and sexual abuse, and her
inability to make herself heard in her own defense after the murder for which she
was convicted. Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, with Wiebe’s
mediation and the weight of his reputation, allows Yvonne Johnson’s voice to be
heard for the first time.
While the book’s title refers to the journey of a “Cree woman,” the text also
clearly recounts the journey of a ‘white man.’ The challenge for Rudy Wiebe is to
find a way to use his power and position in an ethical and compassionate manner
as he extends his previous literary concerns with Native Canadian history to a
contemporary, living subject. Wiebe’s own voice is immediately evident in the
text. The opening sentence reads
To begin a story, someone in some way must break a particular silence. On
Wednesday, 18 November 1992, in Edmonton, Alberta, I received an
envelope from Box 515, Kingston, Ontario. Inside, folded into quarters, was
a long sheet of paper typed from top to bottom, edge to edge, solid with
words on both sides. It began:
Howdy Howdy stranger
My name is Yvonne Johnson. I am currently an inmate at the Prison for
Women in Kingston, Ontario… (p. 3)
This beginning establishes the partnership of the two authors. Johnson’s voice is
given primacy throughout her reflections on her journey without discounting or
erasing Wiebe’s own presence as mediator and ‘first author.’

16
 TRUTH OR LIE

STOLEN LIFE AS A ‘BIOTEXT’

Rather than identifying the text as a traditional, co-written autobiography, we

prefer to describe Stolen Life as a ‘biotext,’ a term employed by Canadian writer
George Bowering to describe a genre that mediates notions of autobiography and
textuality. Joanne Saul (2001) describes biotexts as those works in which “the idea
of the subject is performative and in process” (p. 260). She elaborates:
‘Biotext’ captures the tension at work between the thematic content and the
linguistic and formal aspects of the texts, between the fragments of a life
being lived, the "bio" (with its emphasis on the self, the family, origins, and
genealogy), and the "text," the site where these various aspects are in the
process of being articulated in writing. Rather than admitting a gap between
self and text, ‘biotext’ foregrounds the writer's efforts to articulate him or her
self through the writing process. The text itself comes to life. (p. 260)
In Stolen Life, textuality is emphasized through the interplay of voices and
questions around the contingency of “truth” as presented in the book. Multiple
voices are deployed throughout the text. The story, constructed through the shared
authorship of Wiebe and Johnson, includes excerpts from court proceedings,
interviews with Johnson’s friends and associates, and correspondence between
Johnson and her family. Questions around the “true” circumstances of the murder
for which Johnson is convicted are explored and challenged through multiple and
sometimes conflicting tellings of the events. These ideas around textuality, voice
and “truth” converge in the text and are fore grounded in Wiebe’s ‘Prefatory Note’
concerning his mediation of Johnson’s story:
She has a natural gift of language, which at any moment will follow a detail
and will widen into incident, story, often humour. This was at first sometimes
confusing, even disorienting, until I recognized that her thinking was often
circular, revolving around a given subject, and her writing almost oral in the
sense that I had to catch the tone of her inflection to understand exactly how
the incidents she was remembering connected; where the expanding images
or even parables with which she tried to explain herself were leading. (Wiebe
and Johnson, 1998, p. xi)
Stolen Life, with its dual authorship, deviates from Bowering’s (1988) specific
description of a single authored “biotext.” However, Bowering conceived of a text
in which the author undergoes a transformative experience in the act of writing his
or her biography, presumably for public consumption. In Stolen Life, Johnson’s
private journal writing is the catalyst for her transformative process, and these
journals are the basis of her writerly relationship with Wiebe. As an advocate and
mediator of Johnson’s story, Wiebe purposefully steps back from being the focus
of the story line. This mediation, on the one hand, acknowledges Wiebe’s position,
power and privilege in Canadian literary circles; on the other hand, without this
collaboration, Johnson’s journals would have remained private and it is unlikely, as
a marginalized woman, that her voice and struggle would have been heard.

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CHAPTER 2

Linda Anderson (2001) suggests that while traditionally the author of an

autobiography implicitly declares that the author and the protagonist are the same,
not all subjects are necessarily believed in the same way and not all authors have
the “same legal status” (p. 3). She argues that sincerity itself already implies a
masculine subject and that “insofar as autobiography has been seen as promoting a
view of the subject as universal, it has also underpinned the centrality of
masculine—and…Western and middle class—modes of subjectivity” (p. 3). It is
interesting, then, to consider to what extent Wiebe’s mediation of Johnson’s voice
undermines or reinforces the ‘sincerity’ of her story and how much Johnson is the
object and not the subject of her own story.

THE VOICE OF THE SUBALTERN

Johnson’s marginalization as a Cree woman, as a member of an abusive family and

as a child with a physical disability, position her as a subaltern figure. She was
literally silenced by her cleft palate and her history of family sexual abuse.
However, her intervention in her own silencing through the act of contacting
Wiebe interrupts the stereotypical story of oppression and tragedy. Johnson’s
actions partially support the notion that, as Julia Swindells (1995) claims,
“autobiography now has the potential to be the text of the oppressed and the
culturally displaced, forging a right to speak both for and beyond the individual”
(p. 7). In Johnson’s case, her ability to speak is enabled by two distinct events:
first, the intervention of a white male judge who ‘sentenced’ her to surgery for her
cleft palate, and second, the mediation of a white male voice as co-author.
Ervin Beck (2001) suggests that Wiebe is a contemporary writer who provides a
positive answer to the question raised by Gayatri Spivak's (1988) essay, "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" In Beck’s view, Stolen Life responds to Spivak’s question with
a ‘yes’ because “Wiebe brilliantly demonstrates how it is indeed possible for an
author to enable a ‘subaltern’ to ‘speak’” (p. 861). Beck’s position, however,
constitutes a simplistic response to a complex issue. His comments fail to
acknowledge, as Spivak (1999) does, that “when a line of communication is
established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or
institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony” (p.
310). While Johnson is able to tell her story privately in her prison notebooks, she
can only be heard publicly through the intervention of an influential white male
writer. Spivak (1988) reminds us that for the subaltern to be heard there needs to
be a transaction between speaker and listener and, as a result, Johnson’s “subaltern
talk” in her prison notebooks “does not achieve the dialogic level of utterance”
until it is mediated by Wiebe’s presence (Landry and MacLean, 1996, p.5). For
Johnson as for Wiebe, literature is a political act and needs an audience to be
effective.
Stolen Life is undeniably a political book. The text takes a stance that attempts
to provide viewpoints on Johnson’s history of abuse and murder with an
intentional political agenda. Predominantly, the book creates a much-needed space
for Johnson’s voice to be heard. Quayson (2001) argues that, “the issue to be

18
 TRUTH OR LIE

addressed in relation to the intersection of the aesthetic and political domains is the
degree to which specific configurations of such intersections actually serve to
confirm existing schemata rather than defamiliarizing them and delivering us into a
view beyond them” (p. 94). Johnson and Wiebe, in their deliberately graphic and
painful depiction of Johnson’s life, offer every terrible stereotype of a marginalized
Aboriginal female experience. However, this very act of foregrounding the
“victim” stereotype opens up a space for discussion, reflection and possible
intervention:
[T]o the degree to which literary and aesthetic discourse imagines any
possibility of intervention in the social formation, it has to defamiliarize
existing categories even as it holds them up to view. This is in order that a
double or even redoubled vision takes place. The first is one in which the
contours of existing categories are recognized, and the second, simultaneous
with the first, is one in which these categories are discomposed and seen as
constructions that we can reach beyond….It is only in this way that the
intersection between the aesthetic and the political can be said to be fruitful
for a liberatory politics. (p. 94-95)
Stolen Life itself performs these very categories discussed by Quayson: the story of
Johnson’s life recognizes the stereotypes of Natives in Canadian society; yet, by
particularizing the circumstances and emotions behind her journey towards self-
reconciliation, the book provides a context for moving beyond the dominant
hegemonic discourse around Aboriginal life.
Questions surrounding the intersections of the aesthetic and the political might
fruitfully be considered in the context of readers’ responses to Stolen Life. Here we
take up these questions of voice, veracity and subalternity in relation to the voices
of high school readers who read Stolen Life as part of their Grade 11 International
Baccalaureate English curriculum.

TEACHING STOLEN LIFE

Traditionally, high school Canadian English language arts teachers have tended to
select ‘safe’ texts for their students to read and study. These are texts that form part
of the canonized school curriculum, sometimes officially sanctioned by provincial
curriculum developers, and other times unofficially acknowledged by teachers and
the community as ‘acceptable’ for school reading. While there is a wide spectrum
of texts being taught in today’s classrooms, generally these books do not challenge
mainstream notions of race, gender and class. Little attention is paid to questions of
colonization, power and marginalization. Often the texts are set in the past, and
usually published over 40 years ago (Altmann et al, 1998). Even those books that
were controversial when they were first published, such as Salinger’s Catcher in
the Rye and Golding’s Lord of the Flies, are now considered classics and accepted
as valuable reading material for adolescents. As Eaglestone (2000) points out,
teachers often teach the texts they are familiar with and those that are readily
available in school bookrooms:

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CHAPTER 2

In English at all levels, the same canonical texts come up again and again,
year after year. A person who studied English and has become a teacher
often teaches the texts she or he was taught, in part because she or he was
taught that these texts were the most important. (p. 44)
Although very few contemporary texts by non-mainstream writers find their way
into the high school curriculum, occasionally teachers do bring in texts outside this
sanctioned canon. Often, these books are ones that have engaged teachers with
their narrative power and insight. Susan, the English department head at a large
multicultural Western Canadian high school read Stolen Life: The Journey of a
Cree Woman (1998) in the context of a teachers’ reading group we coordinated at
our University. She was struck by the possibilities this text might offer for her own
teaching. She explains that her decision to teach this controversial book emerged
from her desire to pursue issues of postcolonialism and “otherness” as they play
out closer to “home” and to make a difference in how her students understood the
lives of Native Canadians. She describes her intents as follows:
Reading Stolen Life myself profoundly changed the image I had of the Native
people that I saw downtown. The book offers powerful and direct insight into
the inner secrets of their lives. My students in this International
Baccalaureate class are privileged, both by their intellect and their
opportunities. I hoped that by reading Stolen Life the students would gain
insight and understanding into the lives of those less fortunate than
themselves. I also hoped the book might perhaps make a difference in their
lives and encourage them to show compassion in similar ways to the judge
who "sentenced" Yvonne to having her mouth fixed. I felt that it was
something they needed to know about, as they will very likely be in positions
of power and influence in their lives.
Since this book is outside the received canon of school literature and because of
the violent and sexual nature of its content, it was necessary for the school’s
administrators and parents of students in the class to support Susan’s decision to
teach Stolen Life. It was with this support that Susan taught the book to her
students in a grade 11 International Baccalaureate class. The class, consisting of
students from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds, were asked to write journal
responses for each chapter of the book. These journal responses formed the basis
for regular classroom discussions. As researchers, we had permission to observe
several of these classes and to read students’ journal entries.

RESPONDING TO VOICE, VERACITY AND SUBALTERNITY IN THE TEXT

In their journals and class discussions, many of the students’ responses focused on
comments around how Yvonne’s story is told and on the veracity of the text.
During class discussions we observed a range of responses to Yvonne’s situation
and experiences, with some students strongly empathetic and others skeptical about
Yvonne’s motives for writing the book.

20
 TRUTH OR LIE

Some students in the class, mainly female, responded to the text with empathy for
Yvonne’s situation and actions. One young woman commented: “Yvonne needs to
pour her heart out and let out her feelings. She tells us her story in bits and shows
how her past affects her present.” Another explained,
• By having her serve as narrator for segments of the novel, it helps to create a
mutual trust with the reader of the authenticity of the unfolding events….[B]y
going through Yvonne’s childhood, her experiences, the reader feels obliged
and loyal to her.
Students such as these seemed willing to accept and to trust Johnson’s version of
her story and to appreciate the elliptical style of her narration. While
acknowledging that this style of writing was outside her expectations of an
autobiographical narrative, one female student observed: “Human memory works
like this.”
A number of male students were far more skeptical about Yvonne’s experiences
as described in the book, commenting that she was “full of self-pity” and that she
had an ulterior motive in writing the book, that is, to justify her actions without
taking responsibility. They were more likely to believe Wiebe’s “telling” of her
story than Johnson’s. One boy, for example, commented: “Rudy gives us facts
which are less biased. Yvonne gives us memories which are biased.” Another
considered that “Rudy’s version of events was more cut and dried” and that “Rudy
provided the structure and Yvonne provided the emotion.”
A range of responses from empathy to skepticism about Johnson’s story was
evident in students’ written journal entries. In class discussions, those students who
believed in the sincerity of Johnson’s narrative faced interruptions and challenges
when other students suggested that Stolen Life was about “self-pity” and that
Yvonne Johnson simply “blames others for her problems.”
Evident within these student readers’ responses are tensions around issues of
voice and subalternity. The difficulty that students seemed to be experiencing
revolved around their struggle to articulate the extent to which Johnson both
“represents” and “resists” voicelessness. As a subaltern figure, Yvonne Johnson is
not fully able to take up her own story in her own voice. However, with her
collaboration with Rudy Wiebe, Johnson interrupts this expectation and the book
challenges these student readers to interrogate their previously held notions about
voice and agency.
Many students appeared to accept their teacher’s hope that they would gain new
understandings of how Native peoples are positioned outside mainstream society.
The majority of the students in the class agreed that reading Stolen Life allowed
them access to perspectives and life experiences they would not otherwise have.
One student considered, “It’s important to read books that don’t relate to you…you
need to learn about the world.” Another student wrote, “I can’t identify with the
environment…out there…but books like this educate us.”
Although students thought that the treatment of Natives in Canada was “the
point of the book” many of them recognized that Stolen Life offers only one
perspective into Aboriginal life. For example one student said, “It presents the

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CHAPTER 2

worst of the culture. Others do achieve success.” Another commented, “This was
the first book I read about this. I cannot judge because I have no cross-reference.
The book offers insight into Yvonne’s life only and this may be a biased opinion of
Native culture.”
While recognizing the limited perspective the book offers, these student readers
inadvertently establish Yvonne as a subaltern figure. They recognize the
stereotypes regarding Aboriginal peoples in Canada, and feel uneasy about them.
In general, though, their encounters with Aboriginal peoples appear to be limited to
superficial, often vicarious experiences. Yvonne Johnson becomes, in a sense, a
constructed icon of Aboriginal womanhood. Readers of Stolen Life are faced with a
figure that is more multi-faceted than the stereotypes they expect, yet one that still
represents commonly held views about Native people.
However, despite the challenges students faced in their understandings of the
‘other’ in the figure of Yvonne Johnson, it is unclear to what extent these same
readers were able to similarly challenge their own positioning in relation to the
text. They seemed to attribute the difficulties Johnson encounters to societal factors
and historical contingencies in which they have no stake or involvement. One
student, for example, commented in his journal:
• As a typical middle-class teenager, I found it difficult at times to abandon my
perception that ‘only such events can happen to terrible people anywhere but
here.’….It’s a sad reminder that justice in a democracy is ¼ truth and ¾ mind
games.
While this student seemed to see Johnson’s situation as a breakdown of democratic
principles of justice and fairness, another student attributed Johnson’s
circumstances to imperialism and colonization:
• My belief about the First Nations people who cause problems in society is that it
is the result of past imperialism by European nations, most notably Britain. First
Nations people do not have a true motherland anymore as a result of colonization
of First Nations lands by British people. Obviously, the majority of First Nations
people are just like other people of any nationality, so they are mostly very decent
people. The lack of an actual land makes some Aboriginal people, who do not
coexist very well with other people in society, simply try to survive.
Positioning Yvonne Johnson as a victim of historical and social injustices allows
students to bring a liberal humanist perspective to their readings of Stolen Life
without struggling with their own relatively privileged positions in society. By
consistently viewing Johnson as a subaltern figure, these student readers are able to
maintain a certain detachment from the notion of themselves as direct beneficiaries
of the status quo. Pirie (1997) reminds us of the difficulties teachers encounter in
encouraging reading that draws on our “personal platforms” of “histories and
values” (p. 44) He explains:
To be aware of ourselves as readers, we must acknowledge these personal
platforms. That does not mean surrendering to subjectivity. Once we

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 TRUTH OR LIE

recognize how our values shape our readings, we are in a position to criticize
those values, measure them against the values of others, guard against our
prejudices, and celebrate or revise our values as appropriate. To engage
students in this kind of thinking means inviting them to position themselves
in relation to the values in the text, so that they are ultimately not merely
reading the text, but also reading the world and reading themselves. (p. 44)
As a “subaltern text,” Stolen Life offers opportunities to engage in the kind of
reading Pirie suggests. From our observations, reading Stolen Life did encourage
some students to interrogate their own privilege, while others appeared not to
accept this invitation to reconsider their own positionings. These students
preferred, instead, to read Yvonne as an ‘other’ with whom they had no ethical
relation. The teacher, Susan, was aware of these conflicting responses. She
recognized the risks of asking students to read about “the pain of what we do to
each other as human beings” when it is close to home rather than separated by time
or place, as with most of the “classic” literature students are required to read in
English classes. She recognized that as a ‘reading text,’ Stolen Life presents
significant difficulties, particularly for readers from non-Aboriginal backgrounds.
In this regard, Cynthia Sugars (2001), in her review of Helen Hoy’s How Should I
Read These?, suggests that one of the challenges a teacher might experience in a
mainstream classroom is how these texts are “often unconsciously interpreted to be
about "me", the non-Native reader”. The teacher in our study recognized this risk
and also knew that her efforts to confront her students with “difficult knowledge”
would be met with acceptance by some and resistance by many. These were risks
she was prepared to take in her desire to defamiliarize her students’ preconceptions
surrounding Aboriginal peoples in their community. As a ‘teaching text,’ Stolen
Life presents specific pedagogical challenges that need to be considered. Susan, the
classroom teacher, had certain political and aesthetic intents in introducing the
book to her students, some of which were achieved and others frustrated.

REFERENCES

Altmann, A., I. Johnston & M. Mackey. (1998). “Curricular Decisions about Literature in Contemporary
Classrooms: A Preliminary Analysis of a Survey of Materials Used in Edmonton Grade 10 English
Courses.” Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 44(2), pp. 208–220.
Anderson, L. (2001). Autobiography. New York: Routledge.
Beck, E. (2001). “Postcolonial Complexity in the Writings of Rudy Wiebe.” Ibid, pp. 855–886.
Bowering, G. (1988). Errata. Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College.
Eaglestone, R. (2000). Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students. London: Routledge.
Hoy, H. (2001). How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Landry, D, & G. MacLean, (Eds.) (1996). The Spivak Reader. New York and London: Routledge.
Pirie, B. (1997). Reshaping High School English. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of
English.
Quayson, A. (2001). Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Saul, J. (2001). “Displacement and Self-Representation: Theorizing Contemporary Canadian Biotexts,”
Biography 24(1), pp. 259–272.

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CHAPTER 2

Spivak, G. (1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism
and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Spivak, G. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sugars, C. (2011). “Learning to Read Otherwise.” Retrieved from, http://www.booksincanada.com/
article_view.asp?id=2976
Swindells, J. (Ed.). (1995). The Uses of Autobiography. London: Taylor and Francis.
Wiebe, R & Y. Johnson. (1998). Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
Wiebe, R. (1995). The Temptations of Big Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

NOTE
Portions of this chapter were previously published in English Quarterly, (2004). 36(3), pp. 13–18.

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 CHAPTER 3

TELLING TOO MUCH: CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN

AFRICAN NOVELS FOR ADOLESCENT READERS

Africans have not created modern African literature and criticism in

isolation or outside of the gaze and judgment of the European tradition.
(Handel Kashope Wright, 2004, p. 38).

AESTHETICS AND AUTHENTICITY IN AFRICAN NOVELS

In this chapter we discuss how high school students in a predominantly white

middle-class Canadian school responded to reading the first chapters of three
African novels: A Girl Named Disaster (1996) by American author, Nancy Farmer;
The Bride Price (1976), by Ibo writer, Buchi Emecheta; and Buckingham Palace,
District Six (1986) by South African writer Richard Rive. The intent of the study
was to explore how these adolescent readers in Canada might respond to literary
texts that offered varying degrees of cultural mediation for Western readers.
Our interest in this study arose from personal experiences as English teachers
who, at various times in our separate careers, had struggled with introducing non-
Western texts to our Canadian students. We have met with resistance to reading
these texts by students at high school and at university whose training in the study
of English literature appears to have defined—to the exclusion of other forms—
what counts as ‘literary’ writing. These experiences seemed to validate Derek
Wright’s (1997) claim that
African aesthetics are often different from western aesthetics and this
dichotomy has important consequences for literary appreciation. For
example, while western writers avoid using common sayings and proverbs
because they are frowned upon as clichés, Achebe has declared, ‘Proverbs
are the palm oil with which African literature is eaten.’ (p. 33)
We wondered whether our approaches to teaching non-Western texts encouraged
students to see these works more as cultural artifacts than as literature. Until
recently, this view seems to have been shared by literary critics in Africa and in the
West who often regarded African literature as a totalized vision of Otherness,
summarized in the phase ‘Africa is simply not the West” (Chinweizu and
Madubuike, 1985, p. 30). These critics worked within the terms of the English
literary values with which they were familiar, regarding ‘culture’ as implicitly a
philosophy of racial determinism, accepting African-ness as “an expression of
national identity, racial identity, political consciousness and heritage” (Kanneh,

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1997, p. 79-80). Reading ‘Africa’ has repeatedly been framed “as a battle between
the traditional and the modern world/artist/view. It is this opposition which
explicitly informs the crisis of aesthetics and values confronting critics of African
texts” (p. 80).
These opposing viewpoints about aesthetics in African literary texts also play
out in ongoing debates over voice appropriation in texts and the question of
“authenticity” in writing. Several writers have offered critiques about the
dominance of white perspectives in literary texts set in Africa. For example, Yulisa
Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann (1998) in their discussion of the
difficulties in making changes to the entrenched canon of Western voices in South
African schools in the late 1990s point out:
The power of position determines who will be allowed to speak, and White
power still rules in the world of South African education and children’s
literature. Whites dominate the media, and their voices are welcomed into the
United States and Great Britain by publishers, critics, and librarians. (p. 28)
Other writers, such as Vivien Yenika-Agbaw (2003), who grew up in Cameroon,
West Africa, express concerns in relation to misconceptions about Africa in
literary texts written by “outsiders.” In her analysis of fifty children’s books
written since 1960 and published in Britain and the United States, Yenika-Agbaw
(2003) notes that the most recurrent images in these books describe Africa as “a
primitive/barbaric place, an image that is neocolonial. The stories are set in either
the jungle or a village and depict West Africa as barbaric with people whose
survival methods seem ridiculous” (p. 233). She critiques the white writers of her
selected texts for emphasizing “the exotic nature of West African cultural practices
and the universal truths of human experience” (p. 236). She concludes that writers
need to understand that contemporary Africa is extremely complex. “Neither
completely traditional nor postcolonial (free from colonial domination) in practice,
it continues to accommodate various cultural practices” (p. 243).
Other literary critics such as Hazel Rochman (2003), a white writer who grew
up in South Africa, argue that good writers should also be able to write about
someone else’s culture, provided they do so with sensitivity and insight. Rochman
points out that writers have always written about experiences not their own and
that the ability to tell a good story is not limited to those who write about their own
cultural perspective.
With these debates about aesthetics and authenticity concerning African novels
in mind, we decided to conduct a small study with 16 year-old high school students
in an International Baccalaureate class. The school is in a predominantly white,
middle-class, Canadian suburb; consequently, many of the students seem to live in
a privileged cultural “bubble” which they perceive as “normal,” a perception which
tends to be reinforced by our dominant culture.
We asked these students to perform a blind reading of the first chapter of each
of our three selected novels with African settings, works written by authors with
varying degrees of proximity and distance to the cultures they describe (Larsen and
László, 1990). Students were asked to respond in writing to questions of language,

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voice and cultural mediation. Prior to this study, the grade eleven student-
participants had studied a variety of novels. In these instances, the teacher’s
primary focus had been on establishing issues of translation, audience, voice,
gender, and cultural appropriation and re-appropriation. The literature studied
included the following titles: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Margaret Laurence’s
The Stone Angel, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Toni Morrison’s
Song of Solomon, Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia
and the Scriptwriter. These literary texts all deal with very powerful questions of
voice and students had been encouraged to evaluate and consider issues of
authorial voice and the construction of a reader’s response to a work. They had had
no previous school experience with reading literature set in Africa.
An additional impetus for the study emerged from our own reading of a young
adult novel, A Girl Named Disaster (1996) by Nancy Farmer, a white American
author of young adult fiction who lived in Zimbabwe before moving to the United
States, and situates much of her writing in an African context. A Girl Named
Disaster, a Newbery Honor book, contrasts a traditional Shona culture in
Mozambique with a modern Westernized society in contemporary Zimbabwe.
Nhamo, the protagonist, is a young Shona girl who flees from her village when she
is expected to become the third wife of an old man. Nhamo’s journey to Zimbabwe
in a small boat is both an exploration of unfamiliar territory and a spiritual odyssey
from one culture to another, as she leaves behind her familiar beliefs and traditions
and prepares herself to live in a Westernized society with customs very different
from her own.
The novel succeeds in being an exciting and engaging adventure story with
interesting characters, but we wondered about the choices Farmer has made in her
efforts to mediate an African culture for Western readers. She very consciously
creates the setting of the book with maps of Nhamo’s journey at the front of the
novel and endnotes that relate the history and customs of the Shona people. She
also provides a detailed glossary of Shona and Afrikaans words, most of which are
also translated within the text. Little is left to readers’ imaginations, as Shona
culture is detailed and explicated through Nhamo’s perspective. We felt, on a first
reading, that there was a naïve and unproblematic approach to translating Shona
culture that takes little account of issues of power and representation.
Our discomfort increased with Farmer’s emphasis on the “exotic” quality of
Shona life through creating unfortunate comparisons with the “civilized” culture
that Nhamo encounters in Zimbabwe in the last chapters of the novel. When
Nhamo arrives, ill and exhausted, at an isolated research hospital, she is treated
sympathetically while being somewhat effortlessly transformed into a Westernized
young woman. Sister Gladys, a nurse, teaches Nhamo “to buff her fingernails with
a piece of leather” and provides her with “underpants” which she claims “civilized
women” wear (Farmer, 1996, p. 267). Nhamo very quickly leaves behind the
customs and traditions of the Shona people and settles into Western ways, with
“stylish new clothes, pink plastic sandals, and almost-emerald earrings in her
newly pierced ears” (p. 287). There is a sense in the book that culture is static,

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CHAPTER 3

rather than a fluid negotiation of identity through a multiplicity of discourses and

experiences. In the dichotomy of cultures described, Shona culture appears
primitive and ritualistic, while Western culture, in its colonial manifestation,
appears civilized and multi-dimensional. We wondered whether the high school
students involved in the study would share our own discomfort with the book.
The second novel we selected, The Bride Price (1976), was written by Buchi
Emecheta, an Ibo author from Nigeria who moved to Britain as a young woman
and has divided her time since then between the two countries. Emecheta lives and
writes in the in-between spaces of African and European experiences. Her novel,
The Bride Price, was originally published in Britain in 1976 and apart from Chinua
Achebe’s famous novel Things Fall Apart (1958) remains one of the better-known
novels by a West African writer for North American and British readers. The most
recent paperback edition of her book was published by Oxford University Press in
2008.
The novel is a love story of Aku-nna, a young Ibo girl. At the start of the novel
Aku-nna is living with her brother, mother and father in the city of Lagos. When
her father dies and her mother remarries his brother, the family must move to his
rural village. As Aku-nna matures, her uncle forces her into an arranged marriage.
Aku-nna has already fallen in love with Chike, son of a prosperous former slave,
and runs away from her arranged marriage to marry him. Her break with tribal
custom and her uncle’s refusal to accept the required bride price from Chike’s
family, contribute to Aku-nna’s growing fear that she will be the victim of the fate
decreed by tribal lore—that she will die in childbirth. The novel emphasizes the
clash between the traditional customs of a small Ibo village in Nigeria and the
encroaching influence of Africa's European colonizers, as seen through the eyes of
a young girl. Emecheta uses this practice of bride price literally, as well as
symbolically, to represent women's submission to men in Ibo culture. The book is
a highly accessible read for North American adolescents but Emecheta does far
less cultural mediation of African terminology or contexts for her readers than
Farmer does in her novel.
The third excerpt we asked students to read was the first chapter of the novel,
‘Buckingham Palace’ District Six (1986), written by Richard Rive, who grew up as
a so-called “coloured” person under the apartheid regime in South Africa. The
book is based on Rive’s recollections of life in the 1950s in the District Six area of
Cape Town, a crowded, vibrant slum area, most of whose residents were classified
''coloured.” His story focuses on the lively inhabitants of a row of five run-down
cottages called 'Buckingham Palace' by the locals. In 1966, when urban planners
decided that District Six was located too near the city centre of Cape Town, the
government declared it as a ''White Group Area.” The subsequent destruction of
the community has become the subject of poems, plays, films and museum
displays.
Richard Rive’s first-person narrative and vivid language evoke the life of the
fascinating inhabitants of this vanished community and offer powerful insights into
life under a repressive apartheid regime. His novel was one of the first indigenous

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literary texts to be on high school reading lists in South Africa after the election of
Nelson Mandela in 1994.
We asked students to read the first chapter of each book without any information
about the writer, and then to comment on the following three questions:
1. Who do you imagine as the intended audience for the book?
2. Comment on how the writer uses language to describe the particular African
culture in the book.
3. What do you think is the relationship of each author to the African culture being
described in his or her book? Do you think each author is an ‘outsider,’ or an
‘insider’ to the culture he or she is describing?
We were interested in how students would be able to articulate their thoughts
around issues of language, voice and culture in response to these three books, and
to see if any of them shared our reservations about Farmer’s book.

RESPONSES TO A GIRL NAMED DISASTER

We were surprised at the level of agreement exhibited by students in their

responses to Farmer’s novel. Twenty-three of the 25 students in this class agreed
that her novel, A Girl Named Disaster, was intended for young adults in Western
countries. They supported this opinion with a variety of references to the way
language is used in the text. One student explained that:
• The way each ‘different’ word is defined gives the impression almost as if the
author had to learn it as well and that [s]he has a limited view of the culture.
Other students offered similar comments. One girl explained that
• [The author] exhibits a keen knowledge of what words need to be described and
translated for outsiders. Words like ‘hozi’ are in italics, followed by a few
words to translate so that we can relate.
Another wrote:
• The author goes to a great effort to cram in as much culture as he or she
possibly can rather than unconsciously incorporating it.
Asked whether or not they thought the writer of the book was “inside” or “outside” the
culture being described, most students decided that Nancy Farmer was Western; they
pointed to the particular care being taken to ensure readers were able to share her
insights into Shona culture. One student suggested, “The author is an outsider because
the culture is described very limitedly [sic].” Another explained: “The author probably
went into a great deal of research and probably worked or lived with insiders;” and a
third said: “The author is an outsider but has probably lived there sometime in her life.”
Several students expressed unease about the way Farmer described aspects
of Shona culture. They appeared to detect a disturbing tendency of the author
to unconsciously reinscribe colonial dialectics of good/evil, white/black, civilized/
savage. One student referred to these binaries when she explained: “The culture is

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described in a superficial manner, relating everything to a ‘normal’ counterpart.”

Another commented:
• There’s a lack of much direct cultural reference here except for the story about the
gods which was slanted in such a way that made [the characters] seem overly
superstitious and paranoid and far more savage than their European counterparts.
From their reading of just the first chapter of the novel, most students understood
that an African culture is being explicitly “translated” for them in Farmer’s book.
One student commented directly on the level of didacticism such specific authorial
direction might imply:
• The author is most likely an outsider. They have chosen to describe culture from
behind a glass jar. Apparently we are made to see the culture as undesirable and
primitive. In that, the fact this is written for children is disturbing.

RESPONSES TO THE BRIDE PRICE

Students’ comments on reading the first chapter of The Bride Price show
interesting differences from their responses to A Girl Named Disaster. Almost all
students mentioned that there was a contrast in tone and intent between Emecheta’s
novel and Farmer’s book. Students were divided over the intended audience for the
novel. Some thought it was more of an adult book, while others commented that
Emecheta’s novel might also have been written with teenage readers in mind.
There was agreement, however, that the language of this book was “richer” and
“more complex” than Farmer’s novel. One student explained: “The author seems
to know little, casual quirks about the culture and mentions them in colloquial
language as if it is perfectly normal to them.”
Some students were confused about the status of this writer as either “inside” or
“outside” the culture being described. Several felt that the novel addressed a wider
audience than Farmer’s book. One student wrote: “I think the book could be enjoyed
by people of all cultures. It is more difficult to predict whether the author is an
‘insider’ or ‘outsider’.” Another commented, “Although the names of character
suggest African culture, the writing has a distinct style that makes it hard to know.”
The majority of students, however, agreed that someone with long experience of
the culture being described wrote The Bride Price for Western readers. One
participant said: “The book is written for people of the Western culture to read.”
And a second student wrote:
• The author is someone who has lived in the African culture all their [sic] life. I see
this because there is an unconscious incorporation of African culture into the novel.
Another explained:
• The author is an insider. Not many complex words are used; however, not many
of the foreign words were explained. The author demonstrates knowledge of the
culture through English descriptions of African culture.

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Generally, students were more ambivalent in their responses to our questions about
this author’s cultural positioning. Without knowing anything about Emecheta’s
background as a Nigerian writer who immigrated to Britain, students intuitively
recognized the ambivalence of her position as a writer living between two cultures.
Their written comments about The Bride Price suggested that they appreciated
Emecheta’s narrative strategy of “showing” not “telling” her story in a particular
cultural context.

RESPONSES TO ‘BUCKINGHAM PALACE’, DISTRICT SIX

Little of this uncertainty about the author’s cultural positioning was evident in
student responses to the opening of the South African novel ‘Buckingham Palace’,
District Six, based on Rive’s own experiences as a person of mixed race living
through apartheid. Students were able to recognize that an insider to a culture that
was a colonized amalgam of African and British influences wrote this text. A
number of students demonstrated an awareness of a postcolonial perspective on
cultural appropriation with comments such as: “The author is showing other
African cultures what British colonization can do to their culture[s]”. One student
commented that
• The author shows the influence that the English had over the Africans when
he/she uses words such as “Buckingham Palace” and “King George”…these
words give a feel of England, but in reality the town is far from it.
Another student wrote,
• I think this is written by an insider because of the way he melds all the
contributing cultures into the total cultural mood of his city/town. The author
has chosen to describe it as a mosaic of peoples and beliefs.
With this comment, the student seems to be unconsciously aware of Bhabha’s
(1994) concept of a “third space,” suggesting that “hybridity” exists in the “total
cultural mood” of the not-quite-British/not-quite-African location Rive describes.
As with the other texts they read, the students looked to the language of the
chapter in order to reinforce and articulate their understandings of the text.
Several students suggested that Rive’s portrayal of this culture was far less self-
conscious than was Farmer’s “construction” of culture in her writing. Although
we are aware of the problematic nature of “authenticity” in discussing
multicultural texts, we did notice that many students commented on the seeming
“naturalness” of Rive’s writing. One student attempted to articulate this idea by
saying that “[In the book] they discuss their culture in sporadic bits and it keeps
back from the actual story.”

CULTURAL EXPLORATIONS IN THE CLASSROOM

In their responses, students seemed aware of differences in the proximity and

distance of each author to the African culture being described in the text. They

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recognized that Farmer is situated as an “outsider” to the Shona culture, that

Emecheta struggles with the ambivalence of a diasporic cultural perspective, and
that Rive, while more closely connected to the culture he portrays, articulates its
fractured nature. Students identified binary tensions in the Farmer text, while in
Rive’s novel, they both recognized and appreciated the more fluid and multi-
dimensional nature of culture as expressed by the author. Perhaps students saw this
fluidity as emerging from Rive’s cultural situatedness, which was reflected in such
observations as:
• The culture is described as being only slightly important in comparison to life
itself. However, it is presented as very normal, and as though the author is quite
used to it.
These comments offer us a way to think about the questions of aesthetics and
authenticity that underpinned our study. It is possible that students’ comments on
culture are entangled with issues of literary quality. For example, it may be that
students’ more positive responses to Rive’s portrayal of a particular culture reflect
their appreciation of a particular style of writing rather than the author’s cultural
location. This dilemma was illuminated in a student’s observation that “Although
the language and attitude of the author is blasé and matter-of-fact, I can sense a
rather careful melancholy in the tone.” Such comments are a reminder of the
complexities of authorial voice and of the difficulties in disentangling an author’s
cultural positioning from his or her ability to write convincingly and evocatively.
In general, the students’ responses to these particular works suggest that they
were most satisfied with the texts in which the unfamiliar culture was presented as
“normal” and not obviously translated for them. They were least satisfied with the
Farmer text, possibly due to her explicit translation of Shona culture, which
suggested an anthropological view of the “other.” Students responded positively
when differences between cultures were allowed to emerge naturally rather than
being explained in a didactic manner. They seemed to prefer the works in which
unfamiliar cultural elements are presented in an “assimilative” manner but where
the spaces of cultural difference are opened up and where “cultural differences
are…made peripheral to the central interests of the literary work” (Tymoczko,
1999, p. 21). Rather than feeling themselves dislocated readers of unfamiliar
cultural texts, they saw these excerpts as sites of cultural exploration and learning.
This study suggests that students are not necessarily alienated when they read
cross-cultural texts for which they may not be the intended audience. Our students
were also clearly resistant to the explicit didacticism found in some literature
intended for Western audiences.
Any cultural mediation within a literary text creates a particular space of impact
for readers. Writers of cross-cultural literary texts with an intended appeal to
adolescent readers in the West face particular challenges in creating texts that
mediate traditionally marginalized or stereotyped cultures for less experienced
readers. These writers include both “insiders” of the culture being depicted and
empathetic “outsiders.” In each case, the writer provides a mediating voice
between a reader and a perspective on a culture. Students’ responses to these three

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texts challenge the humanistic assumption that language can be used to “represent”
cultures unproblematically and transparently. These adolescent readers
demonstrated an awareness of how authorial voice both obscures and illuminates
questions of culture and “authenticity.” As young and relatively inexperienced
readers, they were nevertheless able to distinguish between text and sub-text,
surface and under-current. In doing so, these readers were able to articulate
ambiguities and tensions in how writers’ intents can be undermined or reinforced
by the cultural markers implicit in their writing.

REFERENCES

Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart. London: William Heinemann Ltd.

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Chinweizu, O. J. & Ihechukwa M. (1985). Toward the Decolonization of African literature: African
Literature and Poetry and Other Critics. London: Kegan Paul International.
Emecheta, B. (1976). The Bride Price. New York: George Braziller.
Farmer, N. (1996). A Girl Named Disaster. New York: Puffin.
Kanneh, K. (1997). “What is African Literature?: Ethnography and Criticism.” In Mpalive-Hangson M. &
P. Hyland (Eds.), Writing and Africa, pp.69-86. London and NY: Longman.
Larsen, S. F. & János L. (1990). “Cultural-Historical Knowledge and Personal Experience in Appreciation
of Literature.” The European Journal of Social Psychology, 20:pp. 425–440.
Maddy, Y. A. & D. MacCann (1998). “To the Point: Ambivalent Signals in SA Young Adult Novels.”
Bookbird, 36(1), pp. 27–32.
Niranjana, T. (1992). Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Rive, R. (1986). ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six. Cape Town: David Philip.
Rochman, H. (2003). “Beyond political correctness.” In K. G. Short & D. L. Fox, (Eds.), Stories matter:
The complexity of cultural authenticity in children’s literature, pp. 101–115. Urbana, Ill.: National
Council of Teachers of English.
Simon, S. (1996). Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London and
New York: Routledge.
Tymoczko, M. (1999). “Post-colonial writing and literary translation,” In S. Bassnett and H. Trivedi, Post-
colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, pp. 19-39. London and New York: Routledge.
Wright, D. (1997). New Directions in African Fiction. New York: Twayne.
Wright, H. K. (2004). A Prescience of African Cultural Studies. New York: Peter Lang.
Yenika-Agbaw, V. (2003). “Images of West Africa in Children's Books: Replacing Old Stereotypes with
New Ones?” In D. L. Fox and K. G. Short (Eds.), Stories Matter: The Complexity of Cultural
Authenticity in Children's Literature. pp. 230–245. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

NOTE
Portions of this chapter were previously published in English Quarterly, vol. 32, 3, 4, 2000, pp. 27–32.

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 CHAPTER 4

OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE: RE-LOCATING

OURSELVES IN A POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY
PEDAGOGY

Dialogue … challenges us to make and remake our own emancipatory

educational practice. It challenges us to rethink the discourses in which we
operate and languages we use to fashion the ethics of our professional lives.
(Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy, 2001, p. 9–10)

OVERVIEW OF TWO STUDIES

This chapter offers a reflection on two collaborative research studies in which

preservice and practicing teachers developed frames of reference for critically
analyzing multicultural and postcolonial rhetoric, curricula, texts and activities and
attempted to bring these new understandings to their classroom practice. We focus
on the tensions that emerged between these teachers’ professed beliefs about
teaching diverse literatures and their classroom practices, and ways in which these
tensions offered possibilities for developing new reading and teaching practices.
Specific objectives of the studies were to explore and to comment on the
following conceptual and pedagogical issues:
1. What tensions and contradictions emerge between preservice and practicing
teachers’ professed beliefs and understandings about postcolonial literatures and
theories and their classroom practices?
2. How do established ways of selecting and teaching literature for high school
classrooms constrain teachers’ literary choices and pedagogical practices?
In each study, these questions were explored within a collaborative context that
provided opportunities for teachers to challenge their own implicit assumptions
about race, culture, class and gender and to develop strategies for critically
analyzing contemporary multicultural and postcolonial rhetoric and practice.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

These qualitative studies were embedded within ongoing North American debates
over changing literary canons and possibilities for reconceptualizing literary
curricula in diverse contexts through postcolonial studies. As Stephen Slemon
(2003) suggests, the task of making significant changes to a status quo for social
justice is challenging:

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[W]hat useful work can we do as scholars and critics in the project of seeking
real social change? Needless to say, an answer to this isn’t just there….We
have to examine where we come from, and what structures of educational
and economic privilege we inhabit. We have to try to hear, and then to
respect, and always to think through, not only the differences between
ourselves but also the differences between us and those many others who do
postcolonial work in other venues and through other modalities in Canada
but who do not speak from these pages. (p. 319–320)
Some Secondary teachers of literature also struggle with these challenges of
working towards social justice in the context of a sometimes restrictive program of
studies. Complicating this effort is many teachers’ discomfort with the difficult
knowledge of their own positionality in relation to questions of power in the
classroom. Some continue to see themselves as the gatekeepers of a Eurocentric
culture and are resistant to making changes to their text selection and reading
practices. Other teachers have recognized the potential of postcolonial reading
practices and literatures to challenge the nature of the Western literary canon. As
John Marx (2004) suggests:
Whether valued for its difference from the canon or for its reconstruction of
canonical texts and concepts, postcolonial writing may also be credited with
fundamentally altering how literature in general is thought of and how it is
taught. It has become difficult for even the most recalcitrant critics to ignore
imperialism when teaching European literary history or to maintain the canon
is simply a record of what Matthew Arnold dubbed “the best that is known
and thought in the world.” (p. 83)
Despite their possible agreement with Marx’s contention on the potential value of
postcolonial literary studies for their students, many experienced and beginning
teachers have had little preparation for working in culturally diverse classrooms
and little exposure to existing critiques of multicultural education. In their busy
teaching lives, they often have inadequate time to examine their own assumptions
and understandings of culture and schooling, and few opportunities to develop
culturally sensitive teaching materials and activities geared towards social justice.
Teachers are often unaware of how race and culture interact to create complex
educational problems for students of minority backgrounds. Researchers such as
Cameron McCarthy et al (2003); Lisa Delpit (1994), and bell hooks (1994) have
cautioned that educators need to pay special attention to developments associated
with human immigration and cultural difference, and that teachers’ choices of
curriculum texts and teaching styles may inadvertently make students feel that they
are invisible and insignificant and their diverse backgrounds and experiences
irrelevant.
In an effort to situate ourselves within these debates, we looked for a taxonomy
of approaches to literary education that could provide a framework for how
English language arts teachers might address the issues and challenges surrounding
the selection and teaching of postcolonial texts. While recognizing the somewhat

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reductionist nature of the taxonomy offered by Banks’ (1989) model of

multicultural education summarized below, we considered it to be a useful
beginning framework for these studies.

1. Contributions
This approach keeps the structure of the traditional curriculum intact as ethnic
content is added as discrete elements and many times it is limited to celebrating
special days.

2. Additive
This approach involves adding content, themes, and perspectives without changing
its structures, goals and characteristics. The representation and analysis of ethnic
content and materials typically reflect mainstream perspectives as opposed to
perspectives of members of that ethnic group.

3. Transformation
This approach involves the actual restructuring of the curriculum. This
restructuring purports to infuse an examination of issues, themes, and concepts
from multiple perspectives, including mainstream perspectives.

4. Social Action
This approach enlarges the transformation approach by adding components that
require students to address social problems. Students would be encouraged to
critically analyze the literature piece to uncover the social conditions that engender
those types of social relations, and to try to bring their awareness to action for
social change (Montecinos and Tidwell, 1996).
We used this framework as a starting point for two studies, one with
experienced English language arts teachers, and the other with beginning teachers
to explore possibilities for changes in text selections and reading practices in their
classrooms.

STUDY 1: DEVELOPING A POSTCOLONIAL PEDAGOGY

WITH PRACTICING TEACHERS

In this study, we sent an invitation to English language arts teachers in high

schools in and around our Canadian prairie city to meet with us on a regular basis
at our University to explore possibilities for developing a postcolonial literary
curriculum for their students. Eight English teachers from five high schools
responded to our invitation. Three of the schools were large urban multicultural
schools with varied socio-ethnic demographics. Their populations were in
transition, with increasing numbers of immigrant and second generation students

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from countries such as China, India, the Philippines, Afghanistan and various
countries in Africa and South America, and a growing Aboriginal student
population. The two other schools were suburban with largely middle-class, white
populations. Six of the participating teachers were female and two were male.
Three participants were experienced teachers who were English Department heads
in their schools; two others were long-time English teachers in their school
districts; three others had graduated from university during the previous five years.
All participants were white. The research group met after school for two hours
every second week over a two-year period.
During early meetings, we explored postcolonial and multicultural issues
through reading and discussing several theoretical texts. We chose journal articles
and book chapters that we hoped would challenge participant teachers to reflect on
their taken-for-granted curricular and pedagogical strategies in English language
arts classrooms and that might encourage them to consider possibilities for making
changes in their text selection and reading practices. Our selections are described
in Table 1.

Table 1

Author Date Title Brief synopsis

Neil Bissoondath 1998 “No Place Like Home… the An article that
Cracks in Canada's Multicultural challenges notions
Mosaic.” of official
multiculturalism in
Canada.
Deborah Britzman 1991 “Decentering Discourses in An article that
Teacher Education: Or, the disrupts simplistic
Unleashing of Unpopular notions of response
Things.” to literature and
identity formation.
Marilyn Cochran- 1995 “Uncertain allies: Understanding An article that
Smith the boundaries of race and focuses on the
teaching.” challenges of
teaching for social
justice.
Allen Carey-Webb 1992 “Hearts of Darkness, Tarzan, and An article that
the ‘Third World’: Canons and reflects on critical
Encounters in World Literature.” pedagogy and
students’ readings of
postcolonial texts.
Carmen Montecinos 1996 “Teachers’ Choices for Infusing A book chapter that
& Deborah L. Multicultural Content: offers a literary
Tidwell Assimilating Multicultural interpretation of
Practices into Schemata for Banks’ taxonomy of
Instruction in the Content Area.” approaches to
multicultural
education.

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Table 1 (Continuation)

Author Date Title Brief synopsis

Phyllis Van Slyck 1997 “Repositioning Ourselves in the An article by
Contact Zone.” Phyllis Van Slyck
that considers shifts
in pedagogical
relationships with
the teaching of
some postcolonial
texts.
Ingrid Johnston 2000 “Sites of Discovery and A book chapter that
Discomfort: Reading and reflects on
Teaching Multicultural challenges teachers
Literature.” may face when they
bring multicultural
and postcolonial
texts into their
classrooms.

During subsequent meetings over the two years, we continued to reflect on the
theoretical and pedagogical issues described in these articles as we read and
discussed postcolonial novels and short stories written by authors from different
countries. Our selection strategies were informal and collaborative. We primarily
looked for literary texts that address issues such as race, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, discrimination, and other power relations. We found some short and
some longer texts that we considered would be accessible to high school readers
and would provide opportunities for high levels of student engagement and for
raising issues of social justice. The literature was either written in or translated into
English. The selected texts were ones we had read ourselves or were ones
recommended by teachers in the group that seemed appropriate for our
conversations. Our selections are described in Table 2.

Table 2

Author Date Title Setting

Wayson Chow 1995 The Jade Peony Canada
J.M. Coetzee 1999 Disgrace South Africa
Khaled Hosseini 2004 The Kite Runner Afghanistan/United
States
Eden Robinson 2000 Monkey Beach Canada
Shyam Selvadurai 1997 Funny Boy Sri Lanka
Rudy Wiebe & 1998 Stolen Life: The Story of a Canada
Yvonne Johnson Cree Woman
Rosario Ferré 1993 “The Youngest Doll” Puerto Rica
Ha Jin 2000 “A Bad Joke” United States/China

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Table 2 (Continuation)

Author Date Title Setting

Gabriel Garçia 1993 “A Very Old Man with Colombia
Marquez Enormous Wings”
Jhumpa Lahiri 1999 “The Third and Final Canada/India
Continent”
Naguib Mahfouz 1994 “Half a Day” Egypt
Yukio Mishima 1992 “Swaddling Clothes” Japan
Bharati Mukherjee 1989 “The Management of Grief” Canada/United
States
V.S. Naipaul 1959 “B. Wordsworth” Trinidad

Group discussions revolved around the participants’ reflections on the articles we

read together in the group and on their personal reading responses to the selected
novels and short stories. The teachers considered possible reading and teaching
strategies for each text, and made decisions about which of these new materials to
bring into their own classrooms. Subsequently, they related their experiences of
teaching one or more of the texts, and their students’ responses to these texts.
Underpinning these discussions were teachers’ realization of the challenges of
moving out of their ‘comfort zone’ of text selection and reading practices and their
appreciation of the value of the research group for professional development. As
researchers, we collected data for the study from audio recordings of group
discussions and individual conversations that we held with each teacher twice
during the study about their approaches to text selection and their experiences of
literature teaching before and during this research group.

THEMES EMERGING FROM THE RESEARCH

Following transcription and thematic analysis of the audio recordings, we saw

several themes emerging that related to the participants’ beliefs and practices
around teaching postcolonial literatures in relation to Banks’ taxonomy. In our
group discussions, most participants shared Banks’ critique of the contributions
and additive approaches to multicultural education, yet they acknowledged that
their actual teaching practices still fell within these two dimensions. The desire of
the teachers to develop a postcolonial literary curriculum in their classroom was
strongly reflected in the transcribed conversations even when it appeared in tension
with their actual pedagogical practices. The following thematic discussions
illuminate several of these desires and tensions:

The perceived values of postcolonial/multicultural literary education for students

In the research discussion sessions, and in individual conversations, teachers
suggested that there were particular benefits to bringing postcolonial and
multicultural perspectives into their teaching. The first perceived benefit was that

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this approach supported their desire to respect students’ varied worldviews and
perspectives. One teacher commented: "I think it basically comes out of respect.
Respect for people, respect for differences. Respect and acknowledgment.” A
related perceived benefit was the value of multicultural and postcolonial literary
education for more homogenous student populations. As one participant
commented:
• It gives the kids a context in which to understand their own culture, that they
have a culture for one, an identifiable culture, and to broaden their horizons to
see that other cultures have things to appreciate....So in terms of my “white”
kids, it gives them a context to see another culture and their own culture.
Other teachers’ comments supported these perspectives. One participant suggested
that “it allows literature classes to be inclusive.” Another explained that bringing in
postcolonial literature “offers an alternative perspective and gives kids a context in
which to broaden their horizons.” Yet another suggested, “It is a wonderful
opportunity for students to see the world not only through their own eyes, but
through someone else’s.”
It is evident from these comments that the notion of respect was fundamental to
these teachers’ notions of pedagogy and that they were willing to and interested in
teaching literature that promoted intercultural awareness. Several participants came
to understand that it is as crucial to interrogate one’s own cultural location as it is
to be open to others’ experiences. This realization points to their awareness of the
need for students from so-called “normative cultures” to be aware that they are part
of the “multicultural fabric” of a nation and not outside it.

Moving beyond the culture tours approach

Several teachers in the study reflected on the dangers of introducing postcolonial
or multicultural literature as a kind of “culture tour.” One explained:
• You have to start to make them see beyond the physical locale of literature that
they read, bring it to a different level...I'm thinking of the dilemma of treating
literature like some sort of sociological phenomenon as opposed to literary stuff,
and when you're reading multicultural literature that's the tendency with these
guys, especially with the grade 10 kids. It becomes sort of a little walk through
another culture really....I think it's important to bring it out of the setting...to the
philosophical realm when you're discussing these texts.
On the one hand, this teacher’s comment critiques the simplistic, additive
approach to multiculturalism by recognizing the dangers of a “reader-as-tourist”
perspective towards literature study. On the other hand, the desire to bring
literature out of a specific cultural setting and into a “philosophical realm” carries
with it the risk of universalizing difference and denying the historical specificity of
postcolonial texts.
A second participant reflected on the very real need by teachers to moderate
uncomfortable, sometimes confrontational, dialogue in the classroom that may

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arise when issues of power, race, gender, religion, racism and other forms of
marginalization are portrayed in postcolonial texts. She explained:
• I think a good way, in terms of literature, is to go back to whatever piece of
literature you're discussing and then it becomes a third party...Then the heat's
off me, they're not blaming me for, you know, challenging their values, and then
that gives me some opportunity to let them discover it for themselves. So, I
think the effective dialogue is when we discuss literature as literature, and then
kind of touch on those values; it gives them just that much distance.
Here, the teacher acknowledges the fine line that educators walk between
challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions of students and maintaining a safe
and stable learning environment for these students. By using literature to raise
issues of race, class, culture, religion, and gender, and addressing questions of
historic inequities, teachers may enable students to engage in “effective dialogue”
that offers new possibilities for understanding their worlds.
Two teachers in the study commented on the value of open discussion in the
classroom: One explained: "I really value talk in the classroom. I think that's
incredibly important and I think the students learn so much when they listen to
each other...I learn so much from kids when I listen to them." Another discussed
the need to ask questions that challenge our “taken for granted assumptions”
during literary discussions. She commented:
• It’s important to just ask 'why.' I think asking 'why' is essential to being aware, I
think, of the limitations we place on ourselves just out of being passive...you
can kind of put a wedge in their continuum of thought, so that down the road it'll
trigger 'hey, wait a sec'....
The teachers’ desires to stimulate and encourage honest discussions about
postcolonial issues were tempered by the need to maintain a safe classroom
environment. One teacher in the study told the story of an early teaching
experience in which a discussion about culture and racism got out of her control.
She explained that at the end of class “when the bell rang…I was completely in
tears, and the one Aboriginal boy that had brought up the subject came and was
profusely apologetic to me because he felt it was his fault.” As a result of this
experience, the teacher commented “I swore after that day that I was going to be
somebody who was controlling a discussion so that my students don’t get this sort
of open ‘vent my spleen’….That’s not what the study of literature is about. For me,
anyway.”
Despite this uncomfortable experience, the same teacher reflected on the idea
that when we feel "at ease" with our own identities, locations, positions and
understandings and the gaps between them, we can move beyond our ‘comfort
zones’ in teaching literature. She explained: “I thought, I probably needed to
become more expert and have this expertise and as I have done more and more
reading and more and more analysis, I'm realizing that it's not the expertise that I
need so much as the ease." Perhaps “the ease” to which she refers includes an
acceptance of “unease” and discomfort that comes with difference.

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All the teachers in this study referred to tensions evident in their attempts to
move beyond the comfort zones of their own predominantly middle-class, white
mainstream cultural locations. They believed these tensions arose from a variety of
sources including their choices of literature, their teaching strategies, and the
diversity of their students’ backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.

Improving Teaching and Learning through Research and Professional

Development
All participants commented on the value of this study as a professional
development activity for English teachers. They appreciated the opportunity to
network with teachers from other schools who shared an interest in developing
deeper and more theoretical understandings of canonicity, text selection and
postcolonial pedagogy. The discussion group encouraged some teachers in the
group to move to new schools and provided the impetus for others to pursue
graduate studies. Most particularly, participants spoke about the value of having
time to discuss and critique existing multicultural rhetoric, read and discuss
contemporary postcolonial literary texts of potential interest to Canadian high
school students, and to develop and share strategies for a culturally relevant literary
pedagogy. The following comments offer examples of the teachers’ perspectives
on these professional development opportunities:
• I have found that the discussions around how we know and what we know, and
the construction of meaning to be personally enjoyable and informative for my
classroom teaching of literature.
• These discussion groups create a link between the classroom and the university
which I think is essential to be considered a professional at all.
• The research offers a place and time when like-minded professionals can
explore and discuss literature not present in authorized texts – an opportunity to
go beyond the usual.
• I find that I’m a more creative and thoughtful teacher when I’m excited by the
material or approach. However, it’s simply too easy to become complacent or
tired or comfortable with what we do.
• A discussion group such as ours provides an environment for sharing ideas and
resources. This support makes it easier to actually implement new ideas.
• There is little discussion of this topic [postcolonial literature] in the
undergraduate program and therefore there might be little impetus to build such
programs in our high schools. Having the information and a forum in which
issues/complexities of initiating such a program is necessary.
These comments illuminate not only the teachers’ interest in developing a
postcolonial literary pedagogy, but also their desire for ongoing professional
development to support them in selecting and teaching unfamiliar literary texts.
Over the two year period of the study, teachers began to appreciate some of the
tensions and challenges involved in making changes to their ‘tried and tested’

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canonical texts and to encouraging new reading practices in their classrooms that
raised questions of social justice, historical marginalizations and power relations
for their students. For example, teaching Coetzee’s novel Disgrace foregrounded
the destructive forces of racism exemplified in shifting power relations in post-
apartheid South Africa; reading Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy invited students to
share his autobiographical experiences of growing up gay in a homophobic society;
Ferré’s story “The Youngest Doll” and Mahfouz’s “Half a Day” confronted readers
with feminist issues of resistance to the oppression of women in two different
societies, while Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” asked them
to reflect on whether or not they would react to issues of difference with the same
fear and lack of compassion as the characters in his story. These texts provided rich
possibilities for the teachers and their students to move to new understandings of
‘otherness’ and offered them new lenses to view their own and others’ perspectives
and belief systems.

STUDY TWO: ENGAGING PRESERVICE TEACHERS IN POSTCOLONIAL

LITERARY STUDIES

In this second study, we worked with a group of English Language Arts preservice
teachers during their Curriculum and Instruction course in the final year of their
Bachelor of Education program at our Western Canadian university. Following this
five week intensive course, these preservice teachers were enrolled in a nine-week
student teaching practicum in local high schools. Five of the preservice teachers,
one male and four female, all from white European backgrounds, volunteered to
meet with us for a series of five weekly audiorecorded lunchtime conversations
held during the university term. They also agreed to continue these conversations
by email during their nine weeks in school and to meet once more following their
student teaching. Objectives of the study were to:
1. Provide opportunities for participants to gain insight into their own
conceptualizations and experiences of postcolonial issues, and the implications
of these understandings for their own teaching.
2. Enable participants to understand sociocultural values that are embedded in
various Western literary instructional practices and their potential effect on
students from diverse ethnocultural backgrounds.
3. Offer participants insight into possible postcolonial texts and pedagogical
strategies for their teaching in ethnoculturally diverse classrooms.
During our first meeting, we discussed the wide-ranging field of postcolonial
literary studies, beginning with Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s (1998) introductory
description of key concepts in the area:
[P]ost-colonial analysis increasingly makes clear the nature and impact of
inherited power relations, and their continuing effects on modern global
culture and politics….Post-colonial analysis draws upon a wide variety of
theoretical positions and their associated strategies and techniques.

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Moreover, the field seeks to develop adequate and appropriate approaches to

material that is itself diverse, hybrid, diasporic. Its terminology, then,
functions in a highly charged and contestatory atmosphere of intellectual
exchange and cultural negotiation. (p. 1)
We began to consider how we, as teachers, might engage in this process of cultural
negotiation and how we might develop our own approaches to diverse and
diasporic postcolonial texts. Our conversations led to further considerations about
the role of literature in the history of postcolonialism. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and
Tiffin (2002) explain
In its engagement with the culturalist myth of ‘literature’…post-colonialism
brings to cultural studies its own well established concepts of diversity,
particularity and local difference.” (p. 210)
Over the five weeks of the study preceding their student teaching, we asked
participants to engage with these concepts of diversity and cultural difference by
reading and responding to the following three short stories written by authors from
differing backgrounds and traditions:
a) “An Afternoon in Bright Sunlight” by Native Canadian writer, Shirley Bruised
Head (1987).
This story draws upon Aboriginal Canadian mythology to describe the enigmatic
adventures of three children hunting for arrowheads who are unsettled by the chanting
of a mysterious old woman they encounter on their hunt: “Ayissomaawaaawa … I must
be careful. I waited long. Need to grow. Strong” (p. 59).
We read the story in conjunction with an article by Gabrielle Cliff Hodges
(1990) entitled “One Morning’s Reading of ‘An Afternoon in Bright Sunlight’”
which discusses how student teachers in a British teacher education program
negotiated the cultural distance between themselves and the Aboriginal Canadian
characters in Shirley Bruised Head’s story.
b) “The Boy who Painted Christ Black” by African-American writer John Henrik
Clarke (1993).
This story, set in a racially segregated school in the 1940s Southern United States,
tells of a boy who paints a picture of Christ that resembles his father. When the
portrait is brought to the attention of the school district's supervisor, he chastises
the student, but the school's principal defends the freedom of expression of the
young boy and as a result, loses his job.
c) “The Answer is No,” by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1995).
This story, translated from Arabic, describes the experiences of a teacher faced
with the devastating reality of her former sexual abuser becoming her school
principal and her decision to choose independence and self-respect over a marriage
proposal from the tutor who changed her life.

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Each of these texts, in its own way, challenges Eurocentric ways of thinking and
forms of representation and presents readers with new possibilities for thinking
about race, ethnicity, tradition, gender, class and power.
Our literary discussions were embedded within theoretical and pedagogical
perspectives emerging from several journal articles and a book chapter that we
read together as a group. In the articles “Experience and Acceptance of
Postcolonial Literature in the High School English Classroom” by Patricia
Goldblatt (1998), and “Multiculturally Challenged” by Gigi Jasper (1998), teachers
write about the challenges they encountered in introducing postcolonial texts into
their high school English teaching.
In the book chapter “Reading and Resisting Silent Spaces of Whiteness” by
Ingrid Johnston (2003), and the article “When the Mockingbird Becomes an
Albatross: Reading and Resistance in the Language Arts Classroom” by Carol
Ricker-Wilson (1998), two teachers explore the problematics of reading the novel
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960) with students from diverse ethnocultural
backgrounds. Given the prevalence of this novel in Canadian high school English
classes, we felt it was particularly valuable for the study participants to consider
Ricker-Wilson’s reflections on the responses of her African-Canadian grade 10
students to reading and discussing the novel with their peers. She points out that,
although her African-Canadian students had been willing to speak about issues of
black identity and slavery during discussions in which “they were the subjects of
their own carefully framed depictions,” they still felt demoralized by their reading
experience of a book which they perceived had “positioned them as objects of a
lesson on racism for white students” (p. 70). She surmises that even though
authorial intent might have been to critique marginalization and racism, the novel
still positions black readers as “other” while it invites white readers to share in the
pleasurable experience of identification with the main characters of the text.
After reading and discussing these stories and articles, our participants were
enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by postcolonial literary theories and
pedagogies for their teaching and were more reflective about how to approach
teaching canonized texts. One participant in the study explained:
• Because I am probably going to be teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, it is really
useful for me to consider the fact that I am approaching it from a cultural
context where I will be the one that feels good at the end. I can see how,
socially, maybe justice is not really done, but through Atticus and some of the
other people, they take just small steps towards it. I can be the one that will feel
good, but there may be students in my class who will really resist some of the
material in the book because they’re not coming from the same context.
Another participant began to reflect on and reconsider the normativity of whiteness
in school literature and the prevalent North American societal views on black
people:
• I’m trying to collect my thoughts here, about the whole idea of whiteness being
the standard.…it had never occurred to me you know, that when we approach,

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when I approach a text, there are those standards of whiteness. It reminds me

about the portrayal of blacks as in gangs or all these other negative things.
Rodney King is in the news again for being involved with drugs, but it doesn’t
talk about the fact that most serial killers are white, most union busters are
white, all those other things that are just kind of glossed over.
Following our five weeks of readings and discussions, the study participants began
their nine weeks of student teaching under the supervision of experienced mentor
teachers in different high schools around the city. Two of the student teachers were
assigned to teaching poetry and short story units in grade 12 classrooms (the final
year of high school). One of these was a study participant who had a particularly
strong literary background in postcolonial literature and a high degree of
confidence in her teaching ability. She was able to work with her mentor teacher
on a short story research project in which she included some postcolonial texts in
addition to the stories by white American and British writers that had traditionally
been taught in the school. She explains:
• It was good to have the resources you gave us and to think about some postcolonial
stories for the English 30 [grade 12] short story research project….The students had
to work in groups of two or three, select a story, do an author biography, and give
some historical context as well as the analysis of the story. My cooperating teacher
had given me a list of short stories, and they were all the usual British and American
ones, like D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner” and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” So I started suggesting some other stuff
and now we have a chapter by Michael Ondaatje, a story by Zora Neale Hurston and
ones by Gabriel Garçia Marquez and Amy Tan. My teacher was really receptive and
the students found them interesting to read.
This was the only participant among the five who felt she had the confidence and
support to take initiative in the classroom and to create some changes in the school
reading practices. The other student teacher in a grade 12 classroom (the one male
participant in the study) was also given encouragement to introduce some new texts for
the classroom, and went as far as making preliminary selections of some postcolonial
poets, but felt too insecure to select or teach any of the poems. He explained:
• I would have used more poems if I had more background…like, I took out a
book of Langston Hughes poems to use, but I couldn’t find one that went well
with my material, partly because I didn’t know what I was looking for and I’m
not familiar enough with his work to feel just, “Oh, I want to use that poem”.
Three of the five study participants were asked to teach To Kill a Mockingbird to
students in grade 10 classrooms. One of these student teachers felt she had neither
the support of her cooperative teacher nor sufficient time to bring in any new
postcolonial texts to read alongside the novel. She explained:
• It was five to six weeks that I had to teach the novel, so I wasn’t able to bring in
a lot of stuff and when I talked to my cooperating teacher about introducing
some other short stories, there was the whole consideration of photocopying.

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She didn’t want to because they already had established a set number of stories
that they did and she didn’t want to go to this expense of copying all the stories.
So I think it was mostly time for me too, with the novel, that there just wasn’t
time to do the novel and anything significant like a short story well. So I didn’t.
I would have liked to have used, “The Boy Who Painted Christ Black” with To
Kill a Mockingbird because I thought that they would work really well together,
but it would take some time.
The other two participants teaching the same novel explained that an awareness of
the realities of limited school resource budgets, combined with their own lack of
confidence and their limited teaching experience constrained their ability to make
any changes. One student teacher commented:
• Again, I think there’s the consideration of materials and resources because most
schools have To Kill a Mockingbird, and then to order a whole new set of texts
sometimes isn’t feasible. But at the same time, I actually got kind of sick of To
Kill a Mockingbird. I didn’t like it! I mean, it’s almost moralistic, I wanted
something a little less…judgmental; a little less happy in terms of, you know,
“Oh aren’t we great”. I think, actually it was the article that you gave us about
To Kill a Mockingbird that really made me start thinking about that. And one
night, when I was reading it, I can’t remember what part it was, but they’re all
so happy and they do such good things and at the end, you know, you feel so
good and I kind of felt it was a little sappy after a while, so I would like an
alternative. But then again, there’s that whole issue others were mentioning
about having the confidence to know what to teach about a different novel: Am
I getting it? Is it grade appropriate? Is it curriculum relevant?
In their student teaching, most participants relied on the curriculum resources
available in the school and engaged in the kinds of pedagogical practices they had
previously critiqued in our group conversations. In our discussion following their
nine weeks of teaching, they spoke of the specific constraints and tensions that
emerged from their teaching experiences, focusing on these as particular forms of
school literary practices that mediated questions of identity and subjectivity.
A common theme that emerged from four of the participants’ post-teaching
discussion was an acceptance that the canonized texts being taught in the school
had particular value for them as teachers because they had “stood the test of time.”
As one participant rationalized:
• When I got in, they were just finishing off the short story unit. I had a choice of
novels and I basically picked Mockingbird, not because I particularly liked the
issues, but because it’s a practical thing. It’s been taught by the teacher ten
times, you know, over the last ten years. There’s tons of resources out there so I
wanted to spend my time sifting through resources and trying to find what’s
good as opposed to trying to find resources or reading stuff up on a new book.
Along with their acknowledgement of the staying power of such texts, came a
belief that “classroom demographics don’t matter; ‘literature’ is universal.” This

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idea of the universal appeal of canonized school texts emerged again in relation to
participants’ discussions of teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. One preservice teacher
commented that she was happy she had taught the novel because she felt all
students loved it:
• I do think it’s significant to know that every one that I talk to, if they studied To
Kill a Mockingbird, they rank it as their favourite, so I mean, the kids love it,
the kids really enjoy reading it.
Another participant echoed similar sentiments, appearing convinced that the novel
was appropriate for and well received by all her students:
• There was actually a very broad diversity of ethnic backgrounds, religious
backgrounds. A lot of immigrant children in the class. It was really a great
spread of backgrounds. Oh yeah. They all loved To Kill a Mockingbird. We
talked a lot about the themes and characters. We talked a lot about courage and
justice and equality and things like that. I think those are pretty universal.
The desire of these student teachers to cling to “the tried and true” and their
unwillingness to acknowledge the different subject positions of their classroom
readers can perhaps be attributed to their lack of confidence and experience in what
and how to teach and their fear of failure in the classroom. This same lack of
confidence led them to select texts with ready-made questions for students to
answer. As one participant explained:
• Being beginners in teaching it would be very helpful to have questions or
something that we could use, because it’s pretty hard to know if we’re getting
everything from a text when we don’t have any other resources to sort of help us
out…as far as if we’re catching everything.
And another suggested that she would not consider introducing new texts unless
they also included questions to which students could respond:
• I think I would have done the postcolonial stories if there were questions
involved with it, because of the way that I do my lesson plans is that I don’t
pick the story because of the story, I pick how good the questions are
afterwards, so I go with “what are the questions out there relevant with what
we’re doing” and then backtrack on the story.
One participant felt that her literature choices might be different in the future when
she had her own classrooms:
• I probably wouldn’t teach To Kill a Mockingbird. I don’t think I would or if I
did, I would have probably a short story and poetry ahead of time with a lot of
background literature first. Because I think I would want to do more of a unit of
poetry and short stories to go with To Kill a Mockingbird if I was going to do it.
But there are so many other alternatives out there, I just can hardly wait until I
have the skills to be able to come up with my own questions…once I get that
comfort…because I think that even though the kids do enjoy the novel, they

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enjoy it from a very abstract position. Almost like they’re thinking: “This isn’t
going to happen to me, so I can make all kinds of moral judgments about who
these people are and what they’re like.”
This student teacher’s expressed desire to disrupt the seductive power of Lee’s
novel appeared confounded by her sense of discomfort in her lack of expertise in
teaching less canonical literature. The majority of participants in this study
experienced similar anxieties related to their limited teaching experience, their lack
of a sense of autonomy in the classes they were teaching, and their reluctance to
take risks by teaching unfamiliar literature that might position them as “naïve”
readers of the texts. As novice teachers, it was easier for them to reaffirm a stance
of control over a text rather than making themselves appear vulnerable in teaching
unfamiliar and possibly controversial postcolonial texts.

REFLECTIONS ON THE TWO STUDIES: DESIRES AND CONSTRAINTS IN

DEVELOPING POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY CURRICULA

Participants in both studies spoke of a desire for curricular and pedagogical change
that appeared to be confounded by the structural realities of life in schools. These
constraints included minimal resource budgets, the force of literary tradition and a
lack of experience with teaching culturally distant, unfamiliar texts. Despite their
lack of expertise with postcolonial literatures, the more experienced teachers in our
study were willing to take risks with the literature they were teaching and
understood the need to develop their own teaching materials in order to move
beyond the limits of many packaged unit plans. These teachers exhibited a constant
desire for professional development and change within their own teaching
practices. Several were curriculum leaders in their schools and districts; all were
enthusiastic about sharing resources they had developed and new literary texts they
had read. Generally, these teachers were experienced enough to feel comfortable
with their pedagogical expertise even if they did not feel they were ‘expert’ readers
of the postcolonial texts they were incorporating into their teaching.
In contrast, the beginning teachers felt vulnerable in their new roles as
“teachers.” They had not yet had the time or experience to gain confidence in their
own abilities to manage a classroom, to understand curriculum expectations and to
develop a teaching identity. For many of these student teachers, the resources and
literary texts endorsed by their cooperating teachers provided the comfort they had
not yet developed on their own. Even when they were critical of the canonized
texts they were teaching, all except one felt too inexperienced as yet to challenge
the status quo and were overwhelmed by their vulnerable positions as student
teachers.
Returning to Bank’s taxonomy of approaches to multicultural education, we can
now reflect on how teachers in our two studies might be situated along his
continuum in their approaches to literature teaching. It is fair to say that all
participants fell into one of his first three categories: contributions approach
(minimal attention to multicultural content outside of some celebratory and

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superficial attention to diversity); additive approach (introducing some

multicultural content but maintaining mainstream perspectives and structures);
transformative approach (restructuring of the curriculum to infuse an examination
of issues, themes, and concepts from multiple perspectives).
Before they were actually consumed by the realities of student teaching, all the
beginning teachers were enthusiastic about the prospect of introducing a
transformative approach to their English teaching. However, once in the classroom,
most of them felt it was impossible for them even to pay minimal attention to
changing the canon of literature they encountered in their schools. One student
teacher, given exceptional support by her cooperating teacher, was able to move to
an additive approach where she introduced postcolonial authors alongside many of
the traditional short stories in the curriculum.
In contrast, the more experienced teachers in our study felt that they had gained
enough experience and professional autonomy to consider moving from an
additive perspective on literature teaching to a more transformative approach to
curriculum. These teachers came to the research group with a strong desire to make
changes to their own teaching practices. Over the course of the study they were
able to share resources, experiences and pedagogical strategies and to read
unfamiliar postcolonial texts that had potential for their teaching. It is worth
acknowledging that most of the experienced teachers were also in positions of
influence in their school districts: many were department heads or curriculum
leaders who also had control over budgets and book choices. This does not detract
from the fact that they were willing to make changes in their literary choices and
were prepared to take pedagogical risks in teaching postcolonial texts such as The
Jade Peony by Wayson Choy, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai and Stolen Life:
The Story of a Cree Woman by Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson. These texts
were not only culturally unfamiliar to the teachers, but each raised potentially
uncomfortable issues dealing with racism, sexism and homophobia.
Many of these teachers appeared to be moving towards a social action approach
as outlined by Banks, in which they encouraged their students to critically analyze
literature to understand the conditions that underpin a need for social change. It is
also clear from both studies that even when the impetus for curricular change is
strongly felt by practicing and beginning teachers, there needs to be long-term
support for these changes to effectively challenge the entrenched canon of Western
literature in Canadian schools today.

REFERENCES

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Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths & Helen T. (Eds.) (1988). “Introduction.” Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies.
pp. 1–3. New York: Routledge.
Banks, J. (1989). Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Bissoondath, N. (1998). “No Place like Home: … the Cracks in Canada's Multicultural Mosaic.” New
Internationalist, (305), September.

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Britzman D. (1991). “Decentering Discourses in Teacher Education: Or, The Unleashing of Unpopular
Things,” Journal of Education, 173(3), pp. 75.
Bruised Head, S. (1987). “An Afternoon in Bright Sunlight.” In J. Rice & M. Hayhoe (Eds). Writing from
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Carey-Webb, A. (1992). "Heart of Darkness, Tarzan, and the 'Third World'." Ibid, pp. 121–141
Choy, W. (1995). The Jade Peony. Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre.
Clarke, J. H. (1993). “The Boy Who Painted Christ Black.” In Black American Short Stories. J. H. Clarke
(Ed). New York: Hill & Wang.
Cochran-Smith, M. (2004). Walking the Road: Race, Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Cochran-Smith, M. (1995). Uncertain Allies: Understanding the Boundaries of Race and Teaching.
Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 65(4), pp. 541–570.
Coetzee, J.M. (1999). Disgrace. London: Secker & Warburg.
Dimitriadis, G. & C. McCarthy. (2001) Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial: From Baldwin to Basquiat
and Beyond New York & London: Teachers College Press.
Delpit, L. (1994) Other People’s Children. New York: Routledge.
Ferré, R. (1993). “The Youngest Doll.” In A. Applebee & Suzanne L. (Eds.), Multicultural Experiences.
pp. 274–280. Evanston, Illinois: McDougall, Littell.
Goldblatt, P. F. (1998). “Experience and Acceptance of Postcolonial Literature in the High School English
Classroom.” English Journal, November, pp. 71–77.
Hodges, G. (1990). “One Morning’s Reading of ‘An Afternoon in Bright Sunlight’.” In Eve B. and V.
Watson, Where Texts and Children Meet, pp. 71–81. New York and London: Routledge.
hooks b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Hosseini, K. (2004). The Kite Runner. New York: Riverhead Books.
Jasper, G. (1998). “Multiculturally Challenged.” English Journal, November, pp. 93–97.
Jin, H. (2000). “A bad joke.” In The Bridegroom, pp. 142–148. New York: Vintage.
Johnston, I. (2006). “Engaged Differences: School Reading Practices, Postcolonial Literatures and their
Discontents.” In Y. Kanu (Ed). Curriculum as Cultural Practice: Postcolonial Imaginations, pp. 116–
130. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Johnston, I. (2003a) Re-mapping Literary Worlds: Postcolonial Pedagogy in Practice. New York: Peter
Lang.
Johnston, I. (2003b) “Reading and Resisting Silent Spaces of Whiteness.” In Wanda H. & E. Hase-Lubeke
(Eds.), Curriculum Intertext, pp. 227–238. New York: Peter Lang.
Johnston, I. (2000). “Sites of Discovery and Discomfort: Reading and Teaching Multicultural Literature.”
In B. Barrell & R. Hammett (Eds.), Advocating Change: Contemporary Issues in Subject English,
pp. 136–146.Toronto: Irwin..
Lahiri, J. (1999). “The Third and Final Continent.” In Interpreter of Maladies, pp. 173-198. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Lee, H. (1960). To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
Mahfouz, N. (1995). “The Answer is No.” In Borovilos, J. (Ed.), Breaking free: A Cross-cultural
Anthology. Toronto: Prentice Hall Canada.
Mahfouz, N. (1994). “Half a day.” In Something to declare: Selections from International Literature,
pp. 3–6. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Márquez, G. G. (1993). “ A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” In Arthur Applebee & Judith Langer
(Eds.), Multicultural Experiences. Evanston, Illinois: McDougall, Littell.
Marx J. (2004). ”Postcolonial Literature and the Western Literary Canon.” In N. Lazarus (Ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, pp. 83–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
McCarthy, C, M.D. Giardina,& J._K. Park. (2003). “Afterword: Contesting Culture: Identity and
Curriculum Dilemmas in the Age of Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Multiplicity.” Harvard
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Mishima, Y. (Tr. Ivan Morris). (1998). “Swaddling Clothes.” In The International Story. R. Spack (Ed.).
pp. 132–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mukherjee, B. (1989). “The Management of Grief.” In The Middleman and Other Stories, pp. 179–197.
Markham, ON: Penguin Books.
Montecinos, C, & D. L. Tidwell. (1996). “Teachers’ Choices for Infusing Multicultural Content:
Assimilating Multicultural Practices into Schemata for Instruction in the Content Area.” In Francisco
A. Rios (Ed.), Teacher Thinking in Cultural Contexts, pp. 210-238. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Naipaul, V. S. (1992). “B. Wordsworth.” In James, Barry & J. Griffin (Eds.), The storyteller: Short stories
from around the world, pp. 145–151. Toronto: Nelson Canada.
Ricker-Wilson, C. (1998). “When the Mockingbird Becomes an Albatross: Reading and Resistance in the
Language Arts Classroom.” English Journal, 87(3), pp. 67–72.
Robinson, E. (2000). Monkey Beach. Toronto: Alfred Knopf Canada.
Selvadurai S. (1997) Funny Boy. Toronto: Harvest Books.
Slemon, S. (2003). “ Afterword.” In Laura Moss (Ed.), Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian
Literature, pp. 318–324. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press.
Van Slyck, P. (1997). “Repositioning Ourselves in the Contact Zone.” College English, 59(2), pp. 149–
170.
Wiebe, R. & Y. Johnson. (1998) Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

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 CHAPTER 5

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE IDEOLOGY OF

CANADIAN MULTICULTURAL PICTURE BOOKS:
PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS ENCOUNTERING
REPRESENTATIONS OF DIFFERENCE

(WITH JOYCE BAINBRIDGE AND ROCHELLE SKOGEN)

Since texts written for children and young adults both mediate cultural attitudes
and play a part in acculturating young readers, we decided to explore the extent to
which contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books may act as postcolonial
reading sites for interrogating shifting understandings of nationhood and identity.
We pursued our investigation by means of a study involving students in the
Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. One of the central aims of the
study was to consider how these future teachers responded to literary
representations of Canadian identity and how they planned to incorporate their
understandings of multiculturalism in their future teaching.
One of the central principles of Canadian nationhood is official
multiculturalism, which was entrenched through the Canadian Multiculturalism
Act of 1988. The act constitutionally recognized the changing face of Canada as a
result of immigration and promoted an attitude of “tolerance and understanding”
for all Canada’s peoples. Since then, various critiques have pointed to problems
with this vision. One critique suggests that official multiculturalism has rested
predominantly on its efforts to create a coherent common narrative of nation that
fails to address complex questions of identity. Canada has officially relied on the
mythology of ‘two founding nations’ (England and France) as the means of
focalizing its relationships with its visible minority citizens. Canada is a
multicultural country with the rights and privileges of its diverse population
entrenched in law. However, for those citizens outside of the white mainstream,
Canada remains a country in which much of the power rests in the hands of those
of European descent. To quote Henry Giroux (1991), the “mantra of
multiculturalism” (p. 98) that is evident in Canada today suggests that Canada’s
metanarrative of national progress is one of inclusion and acceptance of difference.
But the earlier national mythology of two European founding nations functions as
a strongly embedded aspect of the country’s historical memory. Such a
metanarrative of nation authorizes stories that consciously or unconsciously suppress
knowledge of difference. This kind of narrative works to develop unity through
emphasizing symbolic differences between “ourselves” and “others.” A focus on
superficial trappings of culture such as foods, “costumes” and heritage celebrations

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subsume significant individual differences by perceived distinctions of race,

ethnicity and language that stereotype groups and isolate one group from others.
Postcolonial theorists in Canada and elsewhere who have concerned themselves
with issues of multiculturalism, identity, race and privilege such as Bissoondath,
Bannerji, Bhabha, Giroux, Kamboureli, and Mukherjee have also expressed
dissatisfaction with traditional official notions of multiculturalism and raised
related questions of identity. Scholar and author Bharati Mukherjee (1998), for
example, complains that:
Canada is a country that officially, and proudly resists cultural fusion. For all
its rhetoric about a cultural ‘mosaic,’ Canada refuses to renovate its national
self-image to include its changing complexion. It is a New World country
with Old World concepts of a fixed, exclusivist national identity. (para. 8)
While Mukherjee critiques the “grand narrative” of Canada’s mythology of two
founding nations, the writer Neil Bissoondath (1994) critiques the potential
fragmentation of self that has resulted from replacing one “grand narrative” with
another. He says:
We have, in this country, accepted with little hesitation the psychology of
separation. We have, through practice of multiculturalism, created a kind of
psychic apartheid, the ‘homelands of the mind’ Salman Rushdie has warned
us about. (p. 156)
Here, Bissoondath warns of the dangers of members of ethnic, linguistic or cultural
communities thinking of themselves as living in imagined homelands that separate
them as a group from other Canadians.
In a postmodern understanding, the notion of Canada as a “nation-space,” to use
Homi Bhabha’s term (1994, p. 301), has developed as much in the imagination as
in the social realities of official multiculturalism. According to Canadian writer
and educator, Himani Bannerji (2000), “English/Europeanness, that is, whiteness,
emerges as the hegemonic Canadian identity…. This ideological Englishness/
whiteness is central to the programme of multiculturalism. It provides the content
of Canadian culture, the point of departure for ‘multiculture’” (p. 110). She asserts
that for many Canadian “non-white” immigrants, the discourse of multiculturalism
“serves as a culmination for the ideological construction of ‘Canada’.” She
explains how this discourse places people of colour in a particular situation, where
on the one hand they “provide a central part of the distinct pluralist unity of
Canadian nationhood” and on the other hand provide the ‘difference’ on which
“this centrality is dependent” (p. 96).
As educators who share these critiques of the “grand narrative” of Canadian
multiculturalism, we developed a study to explore how these notions are taken up
by prospective teachers as they respond to a range of Canadian multicultural
picture book. In their complex interaction between words and images, picture
books can act as cultural texts that may promote a cohesive, harmonious and
exclusionary view of national identity, or serve as a counterarticulation to notions

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of a homogenous and cohesive sense of nation. The picture book genre, as Perry
Nodelman (1999) explains, is a paradox:
On the one hand it is seen as children’s literature’s one truly original
contribution to literature in general, a ‘polyphonic’ form which absorbs and
uses many codes, styles, and textual devices, and which frequently pushes at
the borders of convention. On the other, it is seen as the province of the
young child, and is therefore beneath critical notice. (p. 70)
Picture books, as Nodelman points out, are often dismissed simply as texts for the
nursery or the elementary classroom, yet they offer readers of all ages the potential
to engage in particular ideologies of culture presented in semiotic terms:
Because we assume that pictures, as iconic signs, do in some significant way
actually resemble what they depict, they invite us to see objects as the
pictures depict them—to see the actual in terms of the fictional visualization
of it….In persuading us that they do represent the actual world in a simple
and obvious fashion, picture books are particularly powerful deceivers. (p.
72)
Through their ideological stances, picture book stories invite readers to take up
articular subject positions, inviting them to “see” and understand their own
subjectivity, and those of others in specific ways. And, as John Stephens (1992)
reminds us, “in taking up a position from which the text is most readily intelligible,
[readers] are apt to be situated within the frame of the text’s ideology” (p. 67).
Often this ideological position is one that promotes a culturally acceptable view of
who Canadians think they ought to be. Through both words and pictures, picture
books invite readers/viewers to observe themselves reflected in the selected
representations of the text. This complex set of intersecting sign symbols and
forms of cultural representations in picture books encouraged us to develop a
study in which we selected 40 contemporary Canadian multicultural picture
books to introduce into undergraduate pre-service teachers’ courses and to survey
student teachers about their responses to the texts and to questions of Canadian
identity.

AIMS OF THE STUDY

Our underlying intent in this study was to investigate how pre-service teachers
think about issues of Canadian multiculturalism and how these issues will
influence their approaches to curriculum and pedagogy as they attempt to meet the
diverse needs of their students. With this objective in mind, we introduced
elementary and secondary pre-service teachers at our university to a range of
contemporary Canadian picture books that we saw as offering multiple
interpretations of Canadian identity. Pre-service teachers in the elementary route
expect to teach students aged 5 to 11, and those in the secondary route expect to
teach students aged 12 to 18. We felt the experience of participating in the study
would enable the pre-service teachers to develop criteria for the thoughtful

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selection of texts and curriculum materials for culturally diverse school

populations. In addition, we hoped the pre-service teachers would gain new
insights into their own identities as Canadians and into possibilities for developing
relationships with students from backgrounds different from their own.

PARTICIPANTS

For the study, we chose to access five classes of pre-service teachers (a total of 115
students) enrolled in either the third year of a 4-year Bachelor of Education
program or the first year of an After Degree program. Three classes were in the
elementary route of the program and two were in the secondary route. Of the 84
pre-service teachers who volunteered to participate in the study, 67 were female
and 17 were male. Sixty-one of the participants were at least second generation
Canadians and 23 were first generation Canadians. Eight identified themselves as
having First Nations ancestry. Only six spoke a language other than English as
their first language, and all of them spoke fluent English at the time of the survey.
The participants consisted mainly of pre-service teachers of white/European
descent. This demographic is not surprising, given the lack of ethno-cultural
diversity in our Faculty of Education. Carson and Johnston’s (2000) demographic
survey of our pre-service teachers found that over 90% of our student population
claimed to be of white/European descent and the vast majority were born in
Canada. As university students who were planning to become teachers, our
participants had each taken a minimum of six university credits of English course
work (a requirement for their program), but very few had taken additional course
work in children’s literature or Canadian literature. For both the elementary-route
students and the secondary-route English Language Arts students in our study,
such course work would be optional for their program requirements.

METHODOLOGY

For the study, we selected 40 Canadian picture books to present in a workshop

format to each class of students. The picture books were selected according to the
following criteria:
a) Published in Canada since 1990;
b) Set in a variety of regions in Canada;
c) Written/illustrated by Canadians from a range of ethno-cultural backgrounds;
and,
d) Offering a range of perspectives on what it means to be Canadian.
The selection of books for the workshop was not an easy or simple process. We
wanted to present books that represent contemporary life in Canada rather than a
mythic or fairy-tale view of the country. We did not select any books that could be
categorized as trans-cultural (set outside North America), so, for example, none of
Tololwa Mollel’s books were included in the workshop as most of them are set in
Africa. We struggled to balance postmodern postcolonial works such as Thomas

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King’s Coyote Columbus (1992) with more traditional stories such as Peter
Eyvindson’s Red Parka Mary. We included bilingual language books such as
Tomson Highway’s Caribou Song, which is written in Cree and English, and Jane
Cooper’s Someone Smaller Than Me in Inuktituk and English. We selected award-
winning books as well as books that had received positive reviews in educational
journals. Many of the picture books we chose appear on recommended lists for
teachers. The complete list of books used in the workshops is presented in
Appendix A.
We introduced the workshops by reading aloud the picture book Josepha by Jim
McGugan. We provided a powerpoint slide of every illustration. After the reading,
we talked about the potential of picture books for all ages, specifically, about how
text and illustration work together and the benefits of a short text in certain
teaching circumstances.
We also provided an historical context of how Canadian picture books have
changed over time, reminding the pre-service teachers that 50 years ago picture
books were seen as being for very young children only, and few were being
published at all in Canada prior to the mid-1970s. We explained that the relatively
few Canadian picture books published in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, generally
assumed an audience that was mainly white, European, and middle class and the
content reflected this assumption, as did most of the American and British books
readily available then to Canadian children. We suggested that in more recently
published Canadian picture books, attention is paid to presenting a diversity of
perspectives on race, ethnicity, culture, class and gender.
In small groups, the participants browsed through a random selection of books.
We asked them to keep in mind the following questions:
1. What do these books appear to suggest about what it means to be Canadian?
2. Would you use these books in your classroom? Why or why not?
These questions provided some opportunity for discussion about issues of
Canadian identity and the potential role of picture books in elementary and
secondary school curricula. We thought a discussion of these topics would help to
focus the pre-service teachers’ interaction with the books and assist them in
responding to the survey. In the written survey the 84 research participants
provided demographic information on their family backgrounds and home
languages, their responses to the picture books, and their understandings of issues
of Canadian identity, representation and stereotyping in relation to the texts.
Follow-up audio-taped conversations with eight of the pre-service teachers
explored these issues in more depth. Discussion focused on questions of Canadian
identity formation as represented in the picture books and on participants’ own
understandings of what it means to them to be “Canadian”. The interviews also
explored the significance of these understandings for their own teaching and
considered the potential of contemporary Canadian multicultural picture books for
teaching and curriculum development in elementary and secondary English
Language Arts classes. The interview transcripts, survey results and notes

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developed from the taped interviews were analyzed qualitatively for emerging
themes.

FINDINGS

A number of themes emerged from the data analysis, some related specifically to
issues of multiculturalism and some not. As well as describing the most prevalent
attitudes towards multiculturalism, we have chosen to report some of the more
subtle yet related issues that helped to shape or limit the students' willingness to
use picture books or discuss multicultural issues in their future classrooms. In what
follows, we focus on four of the most salient themes from the study:
• Considering the pedagogy of picture books
• Perceiving myself as “Canadian”
• Imagining the “other”
• Exploring controversial issues in picture books

1. Considering the pedagogy of picture books

It was evident from our survey and interviews that pre-service teachers in both the
elementary and secondary routes of the program in our study appeared to be
basically unfamiliar with Canadian children’s literature—a factor that would limit
both their own and their future students' access to Canadian depictions of
multiculturalism. They had difficulty naming any Canadian children’s books they
had read and were also uncertain about whether particular authors and illustrators
were Canadian or not. For example, one respondent listed Jon Scieszka as a
Canadian author and another listed Shel Silverstein. Only six Canadian children’s
authors/illustrators were named: 13 students listed Robert Munsch, two listed
Thomas King and one each listed Margaret Atwood, Michael Martchenko, Paul
Morin and Margreit Ruur. Despite their unfamiliarity with Canadian materials, 47
of the 48 elementary route pre-service teachers said they planned to use Canadian
literature in their prospective classrooms because they thought it was important.
Quotations from the survey illustrate these views:
• It’s good to promote Canadian authors and the context of the books would be
relevant and the students would be able to relate to the content as well as learn
more about the country they live in.
• I will more than attempt. I will ensure there are Canadian authors in my class
and make sure students are familiar with them.
In general, elementary-route pre-service teachers felt their students would be able
to relate to Canadian content more readily than to non-Canadian content and they
commented it was important to select books that were “age appropriate” and “well
illustrated” with a “high interest level”. However, although some pre-service
teachers such as those quoted above showed a certain level of experience and
reflection in regard to Canadian materials, overall they did not see a lack of

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knowledge of Canadian books as a potential disadvantage in teaching. They

seemed to believe that Canadian books would be available in schools, and that
someone else would be selecting and ordering books for their teaching and for the
school library. Certainly in Alberta, this is an unrealistic expectation as there are
few teacher librarians in schools today.
Participants from the secondary route were English Language Arts minors
enrolled in a curriculum and pedagogy course at our university. A number of these
pre-service teachers expressed scepticism about the value of picture books for the
secondary students they might one day teach. For many of them, this hesitation
seemed to be related to their unfamiliarity with any picture books in relation to
their teaching. It was clear that very few of them had ever considered picture books
as appropriate pedagogical materials in secondary classrooms. For example, one of
these pre-service teachers gently reminded the workshop presenter that this was a
class of secondary route students and enquired as to whether the presenter might
perhaps be in the wrong classroom. Some of the comments that reflected these
participants’ perspectives include:
• Using picture books might insult the intelligence of some students and have
adverse effects on self-esteem.
• I won’t use picture books. I feel the students will feel extremely patronized by
them - no matter how complex the issues they raise.
However, our workshop did appear to encourage some of these pre-service
teachers to reconsider the use of picture books in their secondary classrooms. In a
number of cases, they saw picture books as primarily appropriate for English as a
Second Language learners or for so-called ‘struggling’ readers. Commenting on
whether they would use Canadian multicultural picture books in their teaching, two
respondents explained:
• I didn’t even know you could use picture books until this year. It’s exciting.
• I’m not really sure. I’m still struggling with ways to work it into an academic
stream class. Would be very useful in ESL or non-academic streams.
Overall, we found the elementary-route participants in the study had a clearer
understanding of the pedagogical value of Canadian picture books compared to the
secondary-route students. They took the presence and use of Canadian picture
books for granted, but showed a certain naiveté in their expectations regarding the
resources that would be available to them upon beginning to teach. They were also
relatively uncritical of the content of the books. Very few of them commented on
the issues raised by the books or the representations of Canadian identity found in
the books.

2. Perceiving myself as “Canadian”

One of the aims of our study was to consider how pre-service teachers understand
notions of Canadian identity and how these perspectives are illuminated in their

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responses to contemporary picture books. In response to the question of how they

might define Canadian identity many pre-service teachers in both the elementary
and secondary routes expressed the view of Canadian identity as “not American”:
• I think that Canadian identity…is very distinguishable from American identity
as we always say we are not American.
• The intriguing thing about Canadians is their constant insistence to describe
themselves by saying what they are not. To me it seems we are so preoccupied
by juxtaposing our identity in sharp contrast with the US or the Brits. This in
itself, makes our culture interesting—as we are the ‘invisible other’.
• We compare ourselves to other countries by saying what we’re not rather than
what we are. So, you know, we’re not a melting pot like the US. We’re not this,
we’re not that, but you’re left with—what are you then?
The most common response to the question of Canadian identity centred on the
liberal humanist notion of Canada’s diversity and a tolerance for plurality. These
responses evoked the rhetoric of official multiculturalism:
• It means being part of a country where cultural diversity reigns.
• It means to feel safe and comfortable and proud to be Chinese. Canadian
identity means openness, friendliness and being compassionate to others.
Similarly, when asked about how Canadian identity was represented in the picture
books, these students offered a view of cultural harmony emerging from some
reckoning and reconciliation with the past:
• Canadian identity [in the picture books] is about years of change, of growth, of
conflict, of rebuilding, that now we all exist together in harmony, no matter how
imperfect.
• It’s about diversity, welcoming, understanding. Differences are an asset.
• Canadian identity [in the books] is coming from diverse places, cultures,
influences and ways of life, all in one country. Native populations are heavily
represented.
Other responses focused on descriptors and symbols that the pre-service teachers
felt represented Canadian identity. These responses were generally brief and often
fairly superficial in regards to questions of Canadian identity:
• Canadian identity as represented in the books dealt a lot with multiculturalism
and nature. Such things as mountains, brown bears, oceans, trees and a wide
variety of cultures.
• Canadian identity revolves around nature—snow, ice, prairies, Northern Lights,
and stereotypical activities i.e. hockey, building snowmen.
Some of the picture books resonated with certain participants and reminded them
of their own childhoods. Comments from the interviews include:
• When we were in class I almost stole this book [A Big City ABC]. It’s such a
good book. It was a book that totally rung home for me because like the first

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page, A, is for the Art Gallery of Ontario. You kind of go through the book and
I was like totally remembering my childhood.
• M is for Maple, like the Canadian Alphabet is a really good book in terms of
covering Canada east to west, north to south, you know…, it sort of goes
through everything.
• I really enjoyed this Two Pairs of Shoes book because it’s about a little girl that
might feel caught in the middle of a First Nations community with a moccasin
and…I feel like, you know, at the end she’s realized that one isn’t better than
the other but they’re both very, very important to her. And I think that portrays a
message.
Many of the pre-service teachers’ responses were stereotypical and reflected
notions of a ‘benign’ plurality, while other responses relied upon notions of
Canada as a just and equitable society, invoking the rhetoric of state-sanctioned
multiculturalism. For many participants the picture books evoked emotional rather
than political responses. The books triggered memories of childhood events and
places, and the students demonstrated pride in their Canadian identity. However,
many of the participants appeared to be unable or unwilling to engage at a critical
or reflective level in discussion of what it means to be Canadian in a broader sense.
We can only surmise from the responses (many of them very brief) that they had
not previously been challenged to reflect on their understandings of Canadian
identity either in school or in their university coursework. If there are problems
with official multiculturalism, these students did not express their awareness of it.

3. Imagining the “other”

A major purpose of the workshop was to introduce pre-service English Language
Arts teachers to a range of multicultural Canadian picture books for
consideration in their own teaching. Many of these books addressed issues of
culture, race, sexuality and difference that offered intellectual challenges in an
unfamiliar medium. It was therefore not too surprising that the multicultural
nature of the picture books used in the study evoked some resistance from a few
participants:
• As a white, middle-class girl, I felt incredibly under-represented by the literature
in the workshop. While I totally appreciate diversity (you can never get too
much of it) it is easy to marginalize who we are not concentrating on.
• I didn’t find that many of them [the picture books] would relate to mainstream
society.
• I didn’t find anything I could really relate to [in the books]. I’m from a very
nuclear family and grew up in Vancouver.
When asked about how they imagined being Canadian might feel different for
immigrants than for those born here, the overwhelming response fell in line with
the notion of what we call “the myth of the grateful immigrant,” with some racist
overtones:

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• I take for granted our identity whereas it is celebrated much more by people
who have immigrated. People who are immigrating are usually coming from
something worse so they appreciate much more what they find here.
• We know nothing else. They have experienced crappier countries.
• Yes. Those who immigrate here have a greater appreciation for Canada—
however they should learn how to drive before getting a licence!!!
The notion of ‘immigrant as problem’ was expressed by some participants in
relation to their student teaching placements. One student commented:
• I did my [field experience] at an inner city school. It was very, you know, lower
social status…a lot of ethnic diversity, so multiculturalism was sort of a norm,
versus I had a friend who taught in [a more affluent neighborhood] and listening
to her experiences versus mine, I’m like, “You’re crazy. You have it so good
you don’t even know it”.
There was also a prevailing belief that immigrants to Canada are more appreciative
and patriotic than Canadians born here. According to the participants, the latter are
more likely to take their citizenship for granted. One of the pre-service teachers
said:
• My mother left Greece during the Second World War. My mom’s 68 and her
idea of what is Canadian identity versus my idea growing up here my entire life
is sort of a very different thing in terms of …oh this is hard. But sort of right
versus privileges like, what I think is a right versus what she would probably
think is a privilege.
There was a taken-for-granted notion, reflective of the official rhetoric, that
Canada is a multicultural country and that ‘diversity’ is a ‘good thing’. But the
survey and interview data suggested that most participants had not thought deeply
about their own location in this context, nor were they reflective about the fact that
immigrants come to Canada in many different circumstances, not all of them
traumatic. Many participants appeared to conflate immigrants with refugees. These
attitudes, we suggest, unconsciously reveal some simplistic categorizations that
may emerge from official understandings of multiculturalism in relation to
questions of migration and citizenship.

4. Exploring controversial issues in picture books

The pre-service teachers were aware of potential controversies that could arise in
classrooms in relation to their selection of texts. In our study, a number of them
indicated a reluctance to teach picture books that depict various aspects of diversity
in case these books created controversy among students or parents. One of the
major differences between the elementary route pre-service teachers and their
secondary counterparts emerged through this issue of dealing with controversial
subjects. Many of the elementary pre-service teachers were deeply concerned to
avoid controversial books in elementary classrooms. Their definition of

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‘controversial’ appeared to include any materials that presented non-mainstream

points of view. One participant said of George Littlechild’s This Land is My Land:
• It’s too much…the Red Horse Boarding Schools, treatment of natives. I don’t
know if you would call it controversial but it’s sort of a matter of fact. If I had it
my way, if I wasn’t under scrutiny of parents or principals or administrators I
would probably go ahead and teach it.
Others expressed particular discomfort with the issue of sexuality presented in
Asha’s Mums, commenting:
• Asha’s Mums—the lesbian one. About the girl with two moms…if I was
teaching in, you know, the gay village in Toronto, sure why not. But if I’m
teaching at Peace River…. Yeah, no. I tell you I ain’t going to bring this up.
Our understanding of multicultural and diverse picture books includes those that
raise issues of so-called non-mainstream cultures as well as those presenting ethnic
diversity. Asha’s Mums, for example, features non-white protagonists, but the
reason we selected the book for use in the workshop was that the dominant issue is
same-sex parenting. Likewise, we selected the book, How Smudge Came, because
of its sensitive portrayal of a woman with Down Syndrome. Both texts present
readers with perspectives on identities outside the mainstream. It appeared that
books such as these created some discomfort for a number of the elementary-route
pre-service teachers in our study.
In general, the participants shied away from anything they perceived as
controversial, unless it was sanctioned in the Alberta Program of Studies. One
person said,
• If [an issue] comes up then I’ll address it through literature. I don’t see the need
if it’s not in the curriculum. Well, ‘families’ is, and ‘culture’ yes, but certainly
not in my first few years of teaching. I don’t plan on stirring the pot. It’s like we
were talking about death. I mean I’m not going to bring that up either. I mean
families, life cycles, grandparents. I’m not going to bring it up unless, say, there
is a child who does bring it up and there’s some feelings.
Student teachers appear to be very aware of some real problems in the current
educational and political climate and they recognize that introducing controversial
materials into elementary classrooms can be fraught with difficulty for a beginning
teacher. The current climate does in fact create a ‘censorship-in-advance’ that
could be seen as anti-educational. In contrast, some of our secondary-route
participants were more prepared to take risks regarding issues of culture and
representation in books. In fact, one of the secondary route pre-service teachers
chose to incorporate picture books into her high school teaching practicum as a
means of introducing controversial topics with her teenaged students. She
explained her decision to use picture books to deal with sensitive issues in the
following terms:

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• I think when you look at controversial issues such as maybe that Asha’s Mums,
how is that child really different than me? I think that’s not harmful for kids to
think about that. But I can understand the point where parents could get very
upset. But issues about differences within our own country, about different
beliefs and understandings, I don’t see that as controversial.
Both elementary and secondary route participants were apprehensive about
responding to sensitive issues in their classrooms, especially as student teachers
and beginning teachers; however, the majority of the elementary-route participants
expressed a desire to avoid controversy and saw many of the picture books in our
workshop as controversial. We realize that pre-service teachers often hear in
education classes about avoiding lawsuits and about the perceived power parents
can have in influencing a teacher’s educational decision-making. As a result, their
fears may not simply be on account of their own private timidity. The secondary
route pre-service teachers seemed to accept that controversial issues would be part
of their lives as teachers in English Language Arts. Many of these research
participants saw the picture books in our workshop as a means to addressing
sensitive issues in a somewhat non-threatening manner.
While the elementary route pre-service teachers were able to see the merit of
bringing these multicultural picture books into their teaching, many of the
secondary route participants remained skeptical of their value for adolescent
readers. For many pre-service teachers, using picture books in the secondary
classroom is outside the scope of their own experience as students and,
consequently, as teachers. For these participants, the picture books we brought to
them in our workshop presented two challenges: one in the form itself and the
other in the content. For those participants who were more comfortable with the
genre of picture books, the perceived challenges for their teaching were the
controversial nature of some of the books in raising issues of race, class, power and
sexual orientation and having to deal with the “difficult knowledge” of exclusion
and marginalization with their students in school.

REFLECTING ON QUESTIONS OF CURRICULUM,

KNOWLEDGE, AND IDENTITY

Pre-service teachers in our teacher education programs appear to have had few
curricular opportunities to question a white settler view of Canadian identity or to
interrogate stereotypes of Canada’s immigrant and Aboriginal peoples in the texts
they read. Many of our students had not encountered a pedagogical repertoire
outside mainstream notions of identity. Most seem to have had little experience
reading contemporary Canadian picture books at all, let alone ones that offer a
variety of representations and portrayals of Canada’s multicultural and Aboriginal
reality. They had also not considered the potential for such picture books in their
English language arts classrooms. One of the goals of our workshop was to
introduce these pre-service teachers to Canadian multicultural picture books that
they might use in their own teaching, and for all the participants, the workshops

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did succeed in introducing them to Canadian picture books they had not previously
encountered.
But why are our pre-service teachers unaware of Canadian books in the first
place? One reason is that they have likely read very few Canadian books in their
own kindergarten to grade 12 school experiences. In 2002, the Writers’ Trust of
Canada surveyed the English-language Canadian literature taught in Canadian high
schools. Findings from the study indicated that most book selections made by
teachers were based on the availability of texts (books the school already owns),
acceptability (provincial guidelines, community standards and the interests of
students) and the agreed consensus of the school’s English department. When
Baird (2006) reported on the study, she maintained that there are opposing ‘camps’
in regard to the legitimacy of teaching Canadian literature in schools. She
characterized the two camps as follows:
One group believes that teaching Canadian literature is part of a good
education and “good citizenship”—we must be the “only country in the
world that doesn’t teach its own literature in its schools”. There are others
who maintain that the nationality of the author is not important; “Nationalism
and nationalist agenda and the cultural value of literature are mutually
exclusive.” (p. 3)
Baird concluded that Canadian high school teachers need better access to material
about Canadian literature, that there is limited knowledge about Canadian writers
and the Canadian publishing scene even among teachers who are supportive of
Canadian literature, and that there is significant competition from American and
British literature.
Elementary teachers in Alberta also appear to be largely unaware of Canadian
children’s literature. In a survey conducted in 2001 by Joyce Bainbridge, Mike
Carbonaro and Nicole Green (2002), elementary teachers provided many reasons
for not using Canadian children’s literature in their classrooms. Among those
reasons were the perceived high cost of Canadian books (as compared to the
mostly American books available through book clubs); difficulty in finding
information about Canadian books; the lack of trained teacher-librarians in the
schools; and a lack of time to access professional resources such as book reviews,
relevant websites, or professional journals. Teachers were heavily dependent on
locally provided in-services and booklists and on the teacher support material
provided by textbook publishers (e.g., reading series).
The pre-service teachers in our study are not alone in failing to recognize the
importance of Canadian books in the lives of young Canadians. Canadian society
itself is complicit in this failure. The federal government continues to provide
relatively low levels of funding and support to the literary arts and the publishing
industry as compared to just a few years ago. Departments of Education and
teacher education institutions largely ignore Canadian publications. Many
Canadian bookstores stock mainly American materials. Adults purchasing books
for children are not likely to know Canadian titles and authors. In addition, they are

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much more likely to buy books (usually American) in the supermarkets than they
are from bookstores.
Hade and Edmondson (2003) add to the discussion by noting that,
“commercialization has brought popular culture texts and products into children’s
book publishing, possibly compromising the potential for books that reflectively
engage children” (p. 135). Emphasis is increasingly placed on books that will
sell—and sell a wide range of related products (e.g., the Harry Potter line of
movies, toys, costumes, pencils, lunchboxes, etc). Few independent publishing
companies now exist worldwide. Canada is fortunate in having perhaps five or six
such companies publishing children’s materials, a situation that is uncommon in
many countries. Hade and Edmondson point out that Scholastic, however, having
bought out many smaller companies, is now the largest publisher and distributor of
children’s books in the world and has a presence in virtually every school in North
America. It is to Scholastic Canada’s advantage to publish some Canadian
material, thus the company does have a Canadian publishing program, including
the "Dear Canada" series.
The majority of our pre-service teachers are also unlikely to have much
exposure to Canadian picture books (or to Canadian literature in general) in their
Bachelor of Education program. There is no mandatory children’s literature course
for elementary-route pre-service teachers, even for those with a minor in English
Language Arts. Reading and literacy courses may introduce a small number of
children’s books, but these are not likely to be Canadian. Secondary-route pre-
service teachers may take an optional course in Canadian literature as one of their
pre-requisites to enter the Faculty. Those majoring in English Language Arts are
required to take one course in Canadian literature during their program and this
course could range from a course on Canadian poetry to one on the short story or
novel. For the secondary-route English Language Arts minors in our study there is
currently no mandatory course on Canadian literature.
Provincial programs of study, particularly at the kindergarten to grade 9 levels,
do not reflect strong Canadian content. The Alberta Program of Study for English
Language Arts has many more Canadian books in its illustrative examples than it
did even five years ago, but it is still largely dependent on American books. From
grades 10 to 12, a proportion of Canadian content is required at each grade level
but a majority of Alberta high school teachers still favour the canon of largely
American and British texts that they are familiar with, and most are unfamiliar
with Canadian picture books and their potential for teaching. It is hardly surprising
then that the pre-service teachers in our study had little experience or familiarity
with Canadian picture books and had not considered their value for the classroom
prior to our workshop.
A second goal of this study was to explore students’ responses to questions of
identity and difference related to issues of representation in these Canadian picture
books. While participants were generally quick to support liberal humanist notions
of ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance,’ some resistances emerged when their own identities
seemed challenged or when they failed to see themselves represented in the texts
or, indeed, as the focus of the workshop. These resistances point to the prevalent

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notion that whiteness remains the norm in Canada today and, as we suggested in
our introduction, that being ‘white’ is a norm that allows others to be acceptably
different. Deborah Britzman reminds us that “learning to teach means coming to
terms with particular orientations toward knowledge, power and identity” (p. 33).
For some students, interrogating their own identities might potentially mean
coming to terms with a power differential of which they are the beneficiaries.
Again we look to Britzman for insights into “the homogenization of difference”
that is part of the discourse of teacher education:
Value is set on treating everyone the same and this value works against the
idea of differential treatment to redress past and present constraints. At the
same time, teachers are also supposed to ‘shed’ their own social casings and
personal preferences in order to uphold the discourse of objectivity that
beckons individuals as if they could leave behind the social meanings they
already embody. This particular brand of ‘fairness’ requires teachers
to…encounter each student and each other as if they were unraced,
unclassed, and ungendered.…To refuse the effects of such meanings does not
banish them from the lived world of the classroom, or from the subjective
world of teachers and students. (p. 234)
In our study, we see this refusal to acknowledge difference emerge in participants’
desire to homogenize the “other” as “the grateful immigrant” or “the happy
multicultural.” Many of the picture books supported such a view with their
representations of a harmonious cross-cultural Canada. Our study questions
elicited personal responses that suggested a certain comfort level with notions of
“cultural diversity” but a discomfort with the more challenging concepts of
“cultural difference” that appeared to challenge students’ own sense of self.
Canadian academic Erin Manning (2003) reminds us that identity, as the basis for
national unity, “relies on a simplified notion of culture that ignores the disjunctions
and contradictions within historical and social (trans)formations” (p. 62). Neither
identity, subject formation nor culture can exist in an ahistorical political realm, but
each is always subject to transformation and renegotiation. Encounters with
difference, even in seemingly simple texts such as picture books, challenge readers to
come face to face with their own socially constructed subject positions and their fears
and uncertainties of otherness. Such encounters in the context of teacher education
classrooms have the potential to enable pre-service teachers to develop a new sense
of awareness of who they are as Canadians, as learners and as teachers.

REFERENCES

Bainbridge, J., M. Carbonaro,, & N. Green. (2005). Canadian Children’s Literature: An Alberta Survey.
Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 51(4), pp. 311–327.
Bainbridge, J., M. Carbonaro, & B. Wolodko.. (2002). Teacher Professional Development and the Role of
the Teacher Librarian. International Electronic Journal for Leadership in Learning, 6(12). Retrieved
from, http://www.ucalgary.ca/~iejll/volume6/bainbridge.html
Baird, J. (2006). English Language Canadian Literature in High Schools. Toronto: Writers’ Trust of
Canada. Retrieved from,

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http://www.canadacouncil.ca/publications_e/researchdi127234254927656250.htm
Bannerji, H. (2000). The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender.
Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press.
Bissoondath, N. (1994). Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. Toronto: Penguin.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge: London.
Britzman, D. (2003). Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Carson, T. & I. Johnston,. (2000). The Difficulty with Difference in Teacher Education: Toward a
Pedagogy of Compassion. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research, XLVI(1), pp. 75–83.
Cooper, J. (1993). Someone Smaller Than Me. Trans. Charlie Lucassie. Illus. A. Padlo. Iqaluit, Nunavut:
Baffin Divisional Board of Education.
Elwin, R. (1990). Asha’s Mums. Illus. D. Lee. Toronto: Women’s Press.
Eyvindson, P. (1996). Red Parka Mary. Illus. R. Brynjolson. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications Inc.
Giroux, H. (Ed.). (1991). Postmodernism, Feminism and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational
Boundaries. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Gregory, N. (1995). How Smudge Came. Illus R. Lightburn. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press.
Gunew S. (2003). Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalism. New York: Routledge.
Hade, D. & J. Edmondson. (2003). Children's Book Publishing in Neo-liberal Times. Language Arts, (81):
pp. 135–143.
Highway, T. (2001) Caribou Song. Illus. B. Deines. Songs of the North Wind 1. Toronto: HarperCollins.
Kamboureli, S. (2000). Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
King, T. (1992). A Coyote Columbus Story. Illus. W. K. Monkman. Toronto: A Groundwood Book,
Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Littlechild, G. (1993). This Land Is My Land. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press.
Manning, E. (2003). Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McGugan, J. (1994). Josepha: A Prairie Boy’s Story. Illus. M. Kimber. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College
Press.
Moak, A. (2002). A Big City ABC. Toronto: Tundra Books.
Mukherjee, A. (1998). Postcolonialism: My Living. Toronto: Tsar Publications.
Nodelman, P. (1999). “Decoding the Images: Illustration and Picture Books”. In Peter Hunt (Ed.),
Understanding Children’s Literature, pp. 69-80. New York: Routledge, 19969-80.
Rushdie, S. (1992). “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1989-1991.
London: Granta Books.
Sanderson, E. (1990). Two Pairs of Shoes. Illus. D. Beyer. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications Inc.
Stephens, J. (1992). Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction. London: Longman.
Ulmer, M. (2001). M is for Maple: A Canadian Alphabet. Illus. M. Rose. Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear
Press.

NOTE
This chapter was previously published as Johnston, Ingrid, Joyce Bainbridge, Rochelle Skogen and Jyoti
Mangat. “National Identity and the Ideology of Canadian Multicultural Picture Books: Pre-service
Teachers Encountering Representations of Difference.” Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature
canadienne pour la jeunesse 32.2 (2006): 76-96. Reproduced with permission.

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The plenitude of signification is such that 'postcolonial' can include a

historical transition, an achieved epoch, a cultural location, a theoretical
stance -- indeed, in the spirit of mastery favoured by Humpty Dumpty in his
dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to mean. (Benita
Parry, 2004, p. 66)
The studies discussed in this book offer insights into how readers from a range of
ages and backgrounds negotiated meanings in literary texts that were often
culturally distant from their own backgrounds and experiences. The concept of
postcoloniality, as Stephen Slemon (2003) has argued, “is not one that simply
inhabits a text, an individual, or a collective at the level of social identity” (p. 320).
Rather, as he explains, “it is colonialism’s shadow; it is a dialectic of engagement”
(p. 320). When participants in our studies encountered texts such as “The
Management of Grief” (Mukherjee, 1988), Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree
Woman (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998), The Bride Price (Emecheta, 1976),
Buckingham Palace, District Six (Rive, 1986) and A Coyote Columbus Story (King
& Monkman, 1992), they were inevitably engaged with the legacies of
colonialism.
These stories challenged them to enter a space of negotiation with issues of
power relations, marginalization, subalternity, racism and cultural difference.
Through an engagement with the texts, readers in our studies were connected with
contemporary concerns in Canadian society. These included the trials and ongoing
inquiry into the Air India bombing which were evocatively portrayed in
Mukherjee’s story “The Management of Grief,” and the 2010 release of Yvonne
Johnson, co-author of The Journey of a Cree Woman, on full parole under the
‘faint-hope clause’ from federal prison. The stories also resonate with current
international issues of power relations and cultural difference; for example, the
2009 science fiction movie District 9, with its byline “You are not welcome here,”
describes the forcible eviction of aliens from their militarized ghetto in
Johannesburg, South Africa and serves as an evocative reminder of an actual
forcible evacuation of occupants of “District Six” in apartheid South Africa
portrayed in Richard Rive’s (1985) fictionalized memoir Buckingham Palace,
District Six.
In reflecting on our studies, we acknowledge the slippery nature of postcolonial
texts and postcolonial reading practices. Despite ever-increasing use of the term
‘postcolonial’ in a variety of disciplines, it remains hard to pin down. As Prasad
(2005) explains,
Postcolonialism as we know it today is both remarkably focused and distinctly
unruly. It is focused in its critique of colonialism and its continued resilience in
contemporary social arrangements, and it is unruly in its eclectic use of diverse
ideas and methodologies in accomplishing its goals. ( p. 262)

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We recognize that the term ‘postcolonial’ as used in academic and publishing

circles, once referred primarily to the literatures of former colonies under the label
‘Commonwealth Literature.’ Over the past decades, the term ‘Commonwealth
Literature’ has fallen into disrepute, being seen, as John McLeod (2000) has
commented, as “a sub-set of canonical English literature, evaluated in terms
derived from the conventional study of English that stressed the values of
timelessness and universality” (p. 14). According to McLeod (2000), much of this
so-called ‘Commonwealth Literature’ created opportunities for new kinds of
reading and helped to depict the nations with which the texts were concerned. Yet,
despite their experimental elements and local focus, these texts were not viewed as
particularly radical or oppositional; nor were they seen to challenge the Western
criteria of excellence used to read them
More recently, slippage has occurred over the use of the terms ‘multicultural’
and ‘postcolonial’ texts, distinctions we have struggled to articulate ourselves in
the studies described in this book. Many authors have sought to clarify these
distinctions. Salman Rushdie (1991) has critiqued multiculturalism for creating a
kind of ethnic essentialism in order for a culture to be recognized as ‘authentic.’ In
his view, ‘authenticity’ “is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It
demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a
supposedly unbroken and homogenous tradition” (p. 67). Homi Bhabha (1994) has
pointed to ways in which multicultural texts focus primarily on a celebration of
diverse cultures. Literature then becomes a way to express cultural differences in
the controlled spaces of the academy without challenging or threatening
established territorial boundaries or complex power relations. He contrasts this
notion of ‘diversity’ with a more complex concept of ‘hybridity’ that he associates
with postcolonialism’s attempts to create a space for the negotiation of hybrid
cultures that resist easy definitions or boundaries. For Bhabha (1994), postcolonial
literatures engage not only with the “idea of aesthetics” but with ways that culture
is produced “in the act of social survival” (p. 172-173).
From a pedagogical perspective, we are concerned that teachers’ good
intentions to make changes to their text selection and reading practices in schools
are often unintentionally subverted by their desires to be rigorous in requiring
students to focus on the close reading and analysis of the texts, in approaches
deeply rooted in New Criticism and assumptions that reading is a culturally and
political neutral act. Our concerns are that the teaching of multicultural literature as
it is often taken up in schools does little to challenge this notion of cultural and
political neutrality. The texts may become just another site for textual analysis
without attention to what Dimitriadis & McCarthy (2001) term “broader kinds of
dialogue between dispossessed and disenfranchised subjects” (p. 64) and those
currently in positions of power and privilege that underpin postcolonial reading
practices.
Readers’ engagement with the texts in our research created spaces of resonance
or resistance reminiscent of Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogical. For Bakhtin
(1986), dialogue is not simply words or conversation, but openness to difference,
to new ideas and concepts: “A meaning only reveals its depths once it has been

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encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a
kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and onesideness of these
particular meanings, these cultures” (p.7). Dialogue, then, according to Bakhtin, is
not just a semantic tool for explaining or convincing others, but an orientation that
permeates one’s responses to others and to one’s inner consciousness. Carolyn
Shields (2007) elaborates
[I]t is appropriate to say that for Bakhtin dialogue is ontological—a way of
living life in openness to others who are different from oneself, of relating to
people and to ideas that remain separate and distinct from our own. Taken
together, our actuality and other equally valid and distinct realities therefore
comprise a more complete “truth” than can be known otherwise. (p. 65)
A dialogic zone, according to Bakhtin is a form of “third zone that is neither here
nor there…created by the artist’s engagement with a hybrid sense of place, a
dialogic zone where [t]here is neither a first nor last word” (Holquist, 1990, p. 39).
This Bakhtinian zone resonates in significant ways with Homi Bhabha’s (1994)
concept of a “Third Space” of enunciation. For Bhabha, this is an ambivalent space
that opens up a cultural space of tension for the negotiation of incommensurable
differences. “Third” is used to denote the place where negotiation takes place,
where identity in all its ambiguities is constructed and re-constructed.
As readers in our studies engaged with culturally-distant literary texts, they
negotiated what Bhabha (1994) has termed “the representation of difference” (p.
2). He stresses that this representation “must not be hastily read as the reflection of
pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition” but as a
“complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that
emerge in moments of historical transformation “ (p. 2). For many student readers
in the studies, these dialogic negotiations with literary texts from which they felt
culturally dislocated led to new critical awareness and personal insights about the
historical and current legacies of colonial domination. Other adolescent readers
resisted such engagements, while for yet others a lack of a critical understanding of
the texts compromised any deep understanding and personal interpretation.
Creating spaces for such complex negotiations of difference in school
classrooms can be demanding and difficult, as was evidenced by the experiences of
both the student teachers and practicing teachers in our reading group studies
described in Chapter Four. Many of the experienced teacher participants were
interested in moving outside the canon of literary texts most commonly taught in
Canadian high schools and keen to engage students in productive dialogue about
their reading of postcolonial texts. Yet, a number of them experienced tensions and
unease in moving away from being the “expert reader” of familiar canonized
Western literature and were concerned that discussions of issues such as race,
gender, ideologies, and cultural difference highlighted in postcolonial texts might
erupt into unpleasantness in the classroom. These tensions were magnified for the
student teachers in our study by fears of the consequences of bringing controversial
texts into the classroom and feelings of inadequacy about teaching culturally-
distant literature with no ready-made resources.

73
AFTERWORDS

Despite these challenges, we still look with optimism at the future of reading
practices in our schools. We feel encouraged by our various findings from these
research studies to foresee that meaningful changes to literature selections and
pedagogies in the classroom will occur if teachers and their students have
opportunities to engage in ongoing dialogic engagement with each other and with
the increasingly rich and varied postcolonial literary texts available to us today.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff.” In Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Michael Holquist translator), pp. 1-9.
Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.
Dimitriadis G. & C. McCarthy.. (2001). Reading and teaching the postcolonial: From Baldwin to Basquait
and beyond. New York and London: Teachers College Press.
Emecheta, B. (1976). The Bride Price. New York: George Braziller.
Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
King, T. (1992). A Coyote Columbus story. (W.K. Monkman, Illustr). Toronto: A Groundwood Book,
Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
McLeod, J. (2000). Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester University Press.
Mukherjee, B. (1988). “The Management of Grief.” In The Middleman and Other Stories. pp. 179–197.
New York: Grove.
Parry, B. (2004). “The Institutionalisation of Postcolonial Studies.”. In N. Lazarus, (Ed). The Cambridge
Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. pp. 66–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prasad, P. (2005). “Postcolonialism: Unpacking and Resisting Imperialism.” Crafting Qualitative
Research: Working in the Postpositivist Traditions, pp. 262–280. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe.
Rive, R. (1986). ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six. Cape Town: David Philip.
Rushdie, S. (1992). “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist.” Imaginary Homelands, pp. 61-70.
London: Penguin.
Shields, C. M. (2007). Bakhtin. New York: Peter Lang.
Slemon, S. (2003). “Afterword.” In Laura Moss, (Ed.), Is Canada postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian
literature, pp. 318–324. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press.
Wiebe, R. & Y. Johnson. (1998). Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

74
 APPENDIX A

CANADIAN MULTICULTURAL PICTURE BOOKS

PRESENTED IN THE WORKSHOPS

Barber-Starkey, J. (2000). Jason’s new dugout canoe. (P. Montpellier, Illustr). Madeira Park, BC: Harbour
Publishing.
Bouchard, D. (1993). If you’re not from the prairie. (H. Ripplinger, Illustr). Vancouver: Raincoast Books &
Summer Wild Productions.
Brownridge, W. R. (1995). The moccasin goalie. (P. Montpellier, Illustr). Victoria, BC: Orca Books.
Cooper, J. (1993). Someone smaller than me. (A. Padlo, Illustr., Charlie Lucassie, Transl). Iqaluit, Nunavut:
Baffin Divisional Board of Education.
Elwin, R. (1990). Asha’s mums. (D. Lee, Illustr). Toronto: Women’s Press
Eyvindson, P. (1996). Red parka Mary. (R. Brynjolson, Illustr). Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications Inc.
Fitch, S. (2001). No two snowflakes. (J. Wilson, Illustr). Victoria, BC: Orca Book Publishers.
Gilmore, R. (1998). A gift for Gita. (A. Priestley, Illustr). Toronto: Second Story Press.
Gregory, N. (1995). How Smudge came. (R. Lightburn, Illustr). Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press.
Harrison, T. (2002). Courage to fly. (Z. Huang, Illustr). Red Deer, AB: Red Deer Press.
Highway, T. (2001). Caribou song. (B. Deines, Illustr). Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers (First book in a
trilogy entitled, “Songs of the North Wind”).
Highway, T. (2002). Dragonfly kites. (B. Deines, Illustr). Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers.
Jennings, S. (2000). Into my mother’s arms. (R. Ohi, Illustr). Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
King, T. (1992). A Coyote Columbus story. (W.K. Monkman, Illustr). Toronto: A Groundwood Book,
Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Klassen, D. (1994). I love to play hockey. (R. Brynjolson, Illustr). Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications Inc.
Kusugak, M. (1993). Northern lights: The soccer trails. (V. Krykorka, Illustr). Toronto: Annick Press.
Lawson, J. (1997). Emma and the silk train. (P. Mombourquette, Illustr). Toronto: Kids Can Press.
Little, J. & De Vries, M. (1991). Once upon a golden apple. (P. Gilman, Illustr). Toronto: Penguin Group.
Littlechild, G. (1993). This land is my land. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press.
Loewen, I. (1993). My kokum called today. (G. Miller, Illustr). Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications Inc.
Major, K. (2000). Eh? To Zed. (A. Daniel, Illustr). Red Deer: Red Deer Press.
McGugan, J. (1994). Josepha: A prairie boy’s story. (M. Kimber, Illustr). Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College
Press.
Moak, A. (2002, 1984). A big city ABC. Toronto: Tundra Books.
Morck, I. (1996). Tiger’s new cowboy boots. (G. Graham, Illustr). Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press.
Munsch, R. (2001). Up, up, down. (M. Martchenko, Illustr). Markham, ON: Scholastic.
Ningeok, A., Ejetsiak, E. & Ipeelee, M. (1995). Hituaqattaqt. (L. Rigby, Illustr). Coppermine, NWT:
Kitikmeot Board of Education and the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation.
Pawagi, M. (1998). The girl who hated books. (L. Franson, Illustr.) Toronto: Second Story Press.
Ruurs, M. (2000). A mountain alphabet. (A. Kiss, Illustr). Toronto: Tundra Books.
Sanderson, E. (1990). Two pairs of shoes. (D. Beyer, Illustr). Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications Inc.
Skrypuch, M. F. (1996). Silver threads. (M. Martchenko, Illustr).Toronto: Penguin Books Canada.
Spalding, A. (1999). Me and Mr. Mah. (J. Wilson, Illustr). Victoria, BC: Orca Book Publishers.
Spalding, A. (2001). It’s raining, it’s pouring. (L.E. Watts, Illustr). Victoria, BC: Orca Book Publishers.
Trottier, M. (1999). Flags. (P. Morin, Illustr). Toronto: Stoddart Kids.
Truss, J. & Mackenzie, N. (1990). Peter’s Moccasins. (P. Spink, Illustr). Edmonton: Reidmore Books Inc.

75
APPENDIX A

Ulmer, M. (2001). M is for maple: A Canadian alphabet. (M. Rose, Illustr). Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear
Press.
Van Camp, R. (1998). What’s the most beautiful thing you know about horses? (G. Littlechild, Illustr). San
Francisco: Children’s Book Press.
Van Camp, R. (1997). A man called Raven. (G. Littlechild, Illustr). San Francisco: Children’s Book Press.
Waboose, J.B. (2000). Sky sisters. (B. Deines, Illustr). Toronto: Kids Can Press.
Ye, T. (1999). Share the sky. (S. Langlois, Illustr). Toronto: Annick Press.
Yee, P. (1996). Ghost train. (H. Chan, Illustr.). Vancouver/Toronto: Groundwood/Douglas & McIntyre.

76
 INDEX

A H
Aboriginal, viii, 15–23, 38, 42, 45, 66 Historical, x, xi, 6, 9–10, 22, 44, 47, 55, 59, 69,
African, 25–33 71, 73
Arts, xiv, 3, 36–38, 44, 46, 58–59, 61, 63,
66–68 I
Author, ix, x, xii, 12, 16–18, 25–32, 38–40, 45, Identity, vii, ix, xi, xiv, 12, 16, 28, 38, 46, 48,
47, 51, 56, 60, 67, 71–72 50, 55–69, 73
Indian, xii, 1–3, 5, 8, 10, 15
B
Bakhtin, Mikhael, xi, xii, 72–73 F
Bhabha, Homi, vii, viii, xi, xii, 9, 13, 31, 56, Farmer, Nancy, xiii, 25, 27–32
72–73
J
C Johnson, Yvonne, xii, 15–19, 21–22, 39, 51, 71
Canadian, 1–2, 5, 7, 15–17, 19–20, 25–26, 37,
43–46, 51, 55–68, 71, 73 K
Canon, vii, xiii, 20, 26, 35–36, 38, 51, 68, 73 Knowledge, viii, ix, x, 1, 4, 9–10, 23, 29–30,
Class, vii, ix, x, xi, xii, 8, 12, 18–23, 26, 29, 35, 36, 55, 61, 66–69
41–42, 46, 49–50, 58–63, 66
Context, vii, ix, x, xi, xii, 1, 4, 6, 15, 19–20, L
27–28, 31, 35–36, 41, 46–47, 59–60, Language, viii, x, xi, xiv, 2, 4, 10, 17, 19, 26,
64, 69 28–33, 35–38, 44, 46, 56, 58–59, 61, 63,
Controversial, xiv, 15, 19–20, 50, 60, 64–66, 73 66–68, 71–72
Cultural, vii–xiv, 7–13, 25–33, 36, 41, 43, Literary, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 7, 9, 15–17,
45–46, 55–58, 62, 67, 69, 71–73 19, 25–27, 29, 32, 35–51, 55, 67, 71, 73–74
Curriculum, 19–20, 36–37, 40, 44, 48, 50–51, Literature, vii–xiv, 2, 9–13, 18, 20, 23, 25–27,
57–59, 61, 65–69 32, 35–43, 45–51, 57–58, 60, 63, 65, 67–68,
72–74
D
Desire, vii, 20, 23, 40–43, 49–51, 66, 69, 72 M
Difference, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xiv, 7, 10, 12, 20, Mainstream, xii, 11–13, 19, 21, 23, 37, 43, 51,
32, 36 55, 63, 65–66
Discourse, viii, ix, x, xi, 9, 19, 28, 35, 38, 56, Mediation, vii–xiv, 16–18, 25, 27–28, 32
69 Mukherjee, Bharati, xii, 1–2, 4, 7–8, 10, 40, 56,
Diversity, vii, viii, xi, xiv, 12, 43, 45, 49, 51, 71
58–59, 62–65, 68–69, 72 Multicultural, viii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, 1–2, 4, 6–7,
12, 20, 31, 35–41, 43, 46, 50–51, 55–69, 72
E
Education, viii, ix, x, 26, 36–38, 40–41, N
44–45, 50, 55, 58, 66–69 National, 25, 55–69
Ethnic, 2, 12, 37, 49, 56, 64–65, 72–73 Novel, 21, 27–32, 44, 46–50, 68
English, ix, x, xiii, xiv, 2–4, 12, 19–20, 23, 25,
30–31, 36–39, 43–44, 46–47, 51, 56, 58–59, O
61, 63, 66–69, 72 Others, 10, 12, 15, 20–23, 30, 36, 38, 41, 43–
Experiences, xi, xii, 2, 9, 12, 20–22, 25–26, 44, 48, 55–57, 62, 65, 67, 69, 73
28, 31, 36, 40–41, 43–45, 48, 51, 64, 67,
71, 73 P
Pedagogy, viii, x, xi, xii, xiv, 35–51, 57, 60–61
G Perspectives, xi, xii, 2, 11, 21, 26, 37, 40–41,
Gender, ix, x, xi, xiv, 8, 19, 27, 35, 37, 39, 42, 43–44, 46, 51, 58–59, 61, 65
46, 59, 69, 73 Picture books, xiv, 55–69

77
INDEX

Political, ix, x, xii, 2, 18–19, 23, 25, 63, 65, T

69, 72 Teachers, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 3, 10,
Postcolonial, vii–xiv, 1, 20, 26, 31, 35–51, 12, 19–21, 23, 25, 27, 35–51, 55–69, 72–74
55–56, 58, 71–74 Teaching, vii, viii, x, xiii, 12, 15, 19–20, 23, 25,
Power, ix, xi, 1, 5, 11, 16–17, 19–20, 26–28, 35–36, 38–51, 55, 59, 61, 63–68, 72–73
36, 39, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 55, 57, 59, 66, 69, Tensions, x, xi, xiii, xiv, 9, 17, 21, 32–33, 35,
71–72 40, 43, 48, 73
Practices, vii–xiv, 26, 35–40, 44, 47–48, Terms, x, xi, xii, 1, 8, 12, 25, 41–42, 48, 57,
50–51, 71–72, 74 63–65, 69, 72
Pre-service teachers, xii, xiv, 55–59 Texts, vii, viii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 2–3, 7–13,
15–23, 25–27, 29, 31–33, 35–51, 55–59,
R 64–69, 71–74
Readers, vii, viii, x, xi, xii, xiii, 1, 3, 7, 9–12,
15, 19, 21–23, 25–33, 39, 44, 46, 49–50, 55, U
57, 61, 65–66, 69, 71–73 Understandings, vii, x, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 9–12,
Reading, vii–xiv, 2–5, 9–13, 15–23, 25–27, 15, 20–22, 31, 35–36, 38, 42–44, 55–56, 59,
29–30, 35–42, 44–49, 55, 59, 66–68, 61–66, 73
71–74 Unfamiliar, xiii, 9, 27, 32, 43, 50–51, 60, 63, 68
Research, 3–4, 7, 27, 29, 35, 38, 40–44, 47, 51,
59, 66, 72, 74 V
Responses, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 1–3, 5, 8–11, Value, viii, xiii, 12, 22–23, 25–26, 36, 40–44,
19–21, 23, 29–32, 40, 46, 57, 59, 62–63, 48, 61, 66–69, 72
68–69, 73 View, 2, 18–19, 22, 25–26, 29, 32, 44, 46,
56–58, 60, 62, 65–66, 69, 72
S Voice, xiii, 10–11, 15–23, 26–27, 29, 32–33
School, vii, ix, x, xii, xiii, 1, 3, 6, 12, 15, 19–20,
25–29, 35–39, 43–51, 58–59, 61, 63–68, W
72–74 Western, x, xiii, 7, 12, 18, 20, 25–30, 32, 36,
Social, ix, x, xi, xii, 1, 3, 5, 15–16, 19, 22, 44, 51, 72–73
35–39, 44, 51, 56, 64, 69, 71–72 White, xii, 4–7, 16, 18, 25–27, 29, 38, 41,
Space, vii, xi, xii, 1–13, 18–19, 28, 31–32, 46, 43–44, 46–47, 55, 58–59, 63, 66, 69
71–73 Wiebe, Rudy, xii, 15–19, 21, 39, 51, 71
Story, 1–13, 15–21, 26–28, 30–31, 39, 42, Writing, x, xi, xiii, 2, 8, 12, 15, 17, 20–21,
44–45, 47–49, 68 25–27, 30–33, 36
Students, 1–13, 15–23, 25–32, 36–51, 55, Workshop, 58–59, 61, 63, 65–66, 68, 75
57–69, 72–74 World, vii, x, xi, 1, 9, 16, 21, 23, 26, 36, 38,
Study, vii, viii, ix, xii, xiii, 1, 3–4, 7, 9–11, 19, 41–42, 56, 64, 67–69
23, 25–28, 32, 35, 37–47, 50–51, 55–69,
72–73
Subaltern, 18–19, 21–23
Subject, 16–18, 28, 42, 49, 57, 69

78