Toward a Multicultural Pedagogy: Literary and Nonliterary Traditions

Abstract

Over the last two decades, coincident with the broadening of the literary canon, multicultural scholars have produced a vast amount of critical and pedagogical literature. Despite these advances, though, and despite a broad consensus about the and political goals of our work in and out of the classroom-that we have, as Doris Davenport suggests, a moral imperative (66) to teach itwe lack a coherent pedagogy. John Alberti accurately asserts that multicultural scholarship has adequately addressed changing the texts we bring to class but inadequately addressed what we do with those texts in the classroom (xi-xii). Our natural inclination leads us to familiar ways of reading and teaching, but most scholars now recognize that conventional methods may not work in a multicultural literature classroom. However, the responses to this recent awareness provide little guidance, as each seems to exist in isolation, or even counterpoint, to the others. With this fragmentation in multicultural criticism, we lack a coherent framework for creating pedagogy. A brief look at Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men can exemplify what I mean. An extremely difficult text primarily due its cross-cultural contexts but also a powerful and important story of the long-ignored experiences of Chinese-American men in America, China Men poses significant challenges for instructors and illustrates the larger problem of multicultural pedagogy. Western-based critical studies of the narrator's male ancestors tend to focus on narratives of exploration and discovery in the spirit of rugged individualism and the making of America. This theme is initially raised through the first interchapter, On Discov