Travelling with and teaching critical literacy in Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong: A call for postcritique

Abstract

This article is a response to Allan Luke’s [(2018). Critical literacy, schooling, and social justice: The selected works of Allan Luke. New York, NY: Routledge] provocation to “join an international, intercultural and peer-conversation” about the imaginings and possibilities of “an education for critical literacies” (p. xii). Using Edward Said’s [(1983). The world, the text, and the critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press] “traveling theory” to reflect on my own engagement with critical literacy over time, place and space, I stitch together an account of how I mobilized critical literacy within the challenging national contexts of Hong Kong and Singapore after first encountering critical literacy in Australia with Allan Luke. Finally, drawing on emerging theories of postcritique (e.g. Anker, E. S., and Felski, R. (Eds.) (2017). Anker, E. S., and Felski, R. (Eds.) Critique & postcritique. Durham: Duke University Press; Felski, R. (2015). The limits of critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Moi, T. (2017). Revolution of the ordinary: Literacy studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), I explore how top-down, “methods” frameworks in critical literacy might be re-oriented towards more radical and inquiry-based approaches, resisting the imposition of artificial limits to critical literacy pedagogy.