Misreadings

Abstract

Misreadings Yumi Pak (bio) "That reading wasn't more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love."1 I've been teaching the literary theory and criticism class required of all English majors, my sixth time teaching it in as many years. The common charge of many students in the class has been, and remains, that it is just too difficult. For students for whom literature has been a site of potential and pleasurable disidentification, this theory class can be acutely alienating, especially if the comfort of reading is a constant they've had in a largely unfamiliar world. Over 80% of students at California State University, San Bernardino are first generation students, and thus academia, with all of its accompanying rituals, can be a space unknown.2 Some retreat into self-doubt, or worse, the paralyzing possibility that they were never good at reading to begin with. [End Page 43] One reading for the class is Barbara Christian's "The Race for Theory." In it, she excoriates the division between "literature" and "theory" as a divide that ignores the active theorizing undertaken by writers of color in narrative forms. I have asked students to engage with the shifting definitions of literature and theory and consider how one can be disciplined by a discipline, to ask the question that Christian puts to her readers: "[f]or whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism?"3 With Christian, students often conclude that literature is in some ways much more difficult to read than theory. Theorists eventually tell us what their arguments are; "creative writers," on the other hand, don't. Literary analysis, as part of the educational model of reading literature, might seem 'easier' because it has been the template, training us to explain the symbolism of Kino's pearl or Jonas' red sled. Reading is not only a question of what, but also of how. "I can't help but wonder if I've been disciplined to cite Foucault, & whether or not it matters if I read Foucault correctly. Why, still, am I so anxious about misreading Foucault when I have been misread time & time again?"4 Teaching as faculty of color, as underrepresented Black or Native/Indigenous faculty, can mean teaching our students the knife edge of inter/disciplinary language and methodology when they – and we – are so often misread through the depoliticizing and flattened rhetoric of diversity. Why the anxiety of performing a misreading when misreading of people occurs so frequently? When formations of antiblack texts leads to misreading Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd as an act of one bad cop, rather than the institution of policing working perfectly?5 When the strategic formations of heteronormative and misogynistic texts lead to continuously misgendering Tony McDade and erasing entirely Breonna Taylor? When white liberals and conservatives alike delight in quoting Dr. King as a figurehead of respectable niceties, performing not only a willful misreading of his most-quoted speech but also a selective reading of his oeuvre? When so many insist on misreading Amy Cooper as an exception to white womanhood, rather than the rule? How are these things connected to, produced by, something like institutional diversity? "For each paragraph break, he leaned back or forward in his chair. She had an excuse now to stare at the tented fingers she [End Page 44] had always loved: a tap of his left fingertips to his right meant a comma. Right index fingertip to left was a colon; pinkie to pinkie a semi. He bent his knuckles and locked his fingers together for a period."6 Being misread consistently is a condition of what W.E.B Du Bois calls double consciousness, and, differently, what I think of as nunchi.7 Those who teach from behind the veil or with this keen eye prioritize reading students with both tenderness and acuity. We understand the significance of clarity not only in what we teach but with whom we create, for that is what it means to teach – always fleeting, yes, but no less powerful because of its ephemerality. This has been one of the challenges of...