Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian
Canadian Literature undertakes a critical consideration of the relationship
between pedagogy, social justice, and Asian Canadian literature. The project
argues for a recognition of Asian Canadian literature as a creative site concerned
with social justice that also productively and problematically becomes a tool in
the pursuit of justice in literature classrooms of Canadian universities. The
dissertation engages with the politics of reading and, by extension, of teaching
social justice in the literature classroom through analyses of six high-profile,
canonical works of Asian Canadian literature: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981),
SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990), Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical
Field (1998), Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (2006), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the
Time Being (2013), and Rita Wong’s forage (2007). These texts are in many ways
about the reproduction of national, colonial, and neo-colonial pedagogies, a
reproduction of teachings informing subject formation and citizenship from which
higher education is not exempt. The dissertation analyzes the texts’ treatment of
familial and national reproduction, and the narrative temporalities this treatment
invokes, in order to think through the political and social reproduction that occurs
in classrooms of Canadian post-secondary education. This project raises a number
of questions: Do literature instructors engage their students as investigators in the
pursuit of justice? And, if so, what type of justice do we seek to reproduce in
doing so? What happens when instructors engage students in the work of
witnessing fictional testaments of historical trauma, albeit indirectly, as readers?
How might we acknowledge and work through the resistance to learning that
traumatic testimony can invoke? And finally, might it be productive to think of
the work that literature instructors do as a form of activism? Can social justice be
conceived of as a pedagogical project that unfolds in the literature classroom? / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertationt turns to the literature of Asian Canada to think through how we learn and are resistant to learning from historical injustice and about social justice. Chapter One argues that Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, and SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe each play with the detective fiction genre in their treatments of anti-Japanese and -Chinese racism in Canada to upset a definition of justice as stable and finite. Chapter Two examines Madeleine Thien's Certainty and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being as works of trauma fiction that can tell us a lot about the resistance difficult knowledge can provoke. Chapter Three turns to a book of poetry, Rita Wong's forage, to contemplate the temporal and emotional dimensions of everyday, anti-racist and ecological activism; this chapter highlights the limits of discourses of social justice predicated on risk and anxiety.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16459 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Kabesh, Lisa |
| Contributors | Goellnicht, Donald, English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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