Premier’s Lend Lease English Literature Scholarship
Approaches to Teaching Cross-cultural
Identity in English Literature
David Eldridge
Hornsby Girls High School
Sponsored by
Focus of the Study
Developments in the “new” ways of reading, which underpin the rationale of the Stage 6
English Syllabus, require students to have knowledge of how meaning is made, by both
the writer and the reader. Thus an understanding of context and culture in literature as
well as knowledge of various literary theories that have influenced ways of reading and
interpreting texts are an essential part of the contemporary English teacher’s repertoire.
The NSW Department of Education and Training and the English Teachers Association
of NSW have provided extensive professional development for English teachers.
However, as in most workplaces, knowledge, understanding and skills are refined “on the
job”. The evolution of my knowledge and understanding occurred through a series of
realizations, each of which reflects a conjunction between the syllabus requirements and
the realities of my classroom.
Firstly, in my multicultural classroom, the word “culture” has associations with language,
ethnicity, religion, nationality as well as displacement, re-location and hybridisation.
Furthermore, the word is a marker for violent conflicts throughout the world. The
political dimension of culture cannot be overstated; culture has always been the tool of
the powerful. How often haven’t we heard the mantra: “this is the Australian way”?
Having grown up in South Africa I am only too familiar with the discourse of
institutionalised racism.
Secondly, the Preliminary Extension 1 course and the HSC Extension 1 course directed
me to ensure that my students explore ideas of value and consider how cultural values
and systems of valuation arise. Implicit here are the dual modes of culture as production
and culture as consumption. Thirdly, the HSC Extension 1 Elective: Retreat from the Global
prescribes postcolonial texts dealing with characters who are culturally marginalized.
There is obvious resonance here. Fourthly, I noticed students increasingly using the new
HSC English Extension 2 course to write short stories about the migrant experience.
Typically these are based upon personal or family histories.
Initially, I found myself teaching culture as locale specific, that is, culture as inextricably
linked to territory and manifesting in language, practices, beliefs and artefacts. However,
I was also teaching that values are only an expression of the collective experiences of
particular cultural congregations and therefore relative as constructions or inventions they can be deconstructed and reinvented in different geospatial contexts. The dilemma I
was faced with was that the evaluation of cultural values must be based on some
universal criteria. The corollary of saying that “our values are good” is that “your values
are bad”. This approach is to disavow tolerance and has the potential to plunge us into a
paralyzing cultural relativism.
Teaching literature in these extension courses then required that I eschew reductionist
definitions of culture. In a world that is struggling to negotiate rapid change and its
concomitant strangeness, to represent the discussion of culture, context and values as a
contest between fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism seems to deny the complexities
inherent in the struggle between local realities and global imperatives, between
regionalism and internationalism. This debate is one of the powerful metathemes of
postcolonial fiction.i Indo-Anglian writers, in particular diasporic Indo-Anglian writers,
have produced a body of English literature that is being widely acclaimed for its
exploration of the challenges facing local identities in an increasingly global culture.
However, this literature is not without its critics. Many of the best Indo-Anglian writers
have been accused of retreating into a metropolitan or cosmopolitan elitism which
distorts the authentic voice of the Indian experience. ii Also, I had read that Indians have
emerged as the fastest growing group of migrants entering Australia - they are now the
third largest immigrant group behind the British and New Zealanders.iii
Thus it seemed that the next step in the evolutionary process in the development of my
knowledge and understanding regarding cultural negotiations would be to visit the
departure points of the Indian diaspora, meet with Indian writers and academics and
discuss teaching programs that explore the role of the ex-centric or marginalized
character in an increasingly globalised world culture. I was particularly interested in
researching the diasporic writers: Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Bharati Mukherjee,
Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Gita Mehta, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, Monica Ali and
Jhumpa Lahiri.
And, of course, it is ironically the infamous Macaulay’s Minute of 1853iv which led to the
Indian civil service having to submit to a study of English literature, that we owe the
present study of English. The literature of England was seen as a mould of the English
way of life, morals, taste and the English way of doing things. So what was initially
conceived of as a means of ‘civilising’ the native population of India is today the basis of
our English curriculum.
The Research
This report is an abridged version of a fuller paper which will be published in the English
Teachers Association journal, Metaphor.
Having read widely in the area of postcolonial studies and having translated my
knowledge into a high school English teacher’s discourse, I assumed I had a reasonable
command of the issues and that the study tour would confirm this understanding and
offer some new perspectives. I soon discovered postcolonial critics are resistant to the
interpolation of postcolonial literature, and themselves, as mouthpieces for the
marginalized. When I identified Rushdie as a postcolonial writer existing “in-betweenworlds”, and whose project it is to bring into representation marginalized characters and
cultures, Professor Harish Trivedi of Delhi University was dismissive of this view. As a
representative from the ‘First World’ I almost axiomatically assumed the definitions of
‘postcolonial’ and ‘marginalized’ to employ a narrow understanding of what postcolonial
writers do, viz. present revisionist readings of history from marginalized points of view.
Upon reflection, I think this is what the professor was getting at were those cultural
patterns of thought that have created the western academy’s fetishising of postcolonial
literature through the incorporation of postcolonial studies in English courses (such as
the one I teach) and the “prizing” of postcolonial literature (in particular The Man Booker
Prize) whereby postcolonial literature is judged, valued and made a commodity by
western educational institutions and marketing machines. In other words, the
perpetuation of a “regime of value” that decides who or what is canonised. It was one of
many unconscious assumptions or cultural patterns of thought that I had to “unlearn”
during my study tour. Postcolonial criticism is essentially a Eurocentric project
attempting to define the imaginings and historical revisions of colonised peoples.
Towards the end of my week in Delhi I was re-reading Homi Babha’s The Location of
Culture in the Sahitya Akademi Library in Delhi, and came to the realization that I would
be better off refocusing on Homi Bhabha’s more embracing definition of postcolonial
perspectives. He suggests they
‘…emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of
‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They
intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic
‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged,
histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions
around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in
order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the ‘rationalizations’
of modernity’.x
This is, I think, exactly what Arundhati Roy seeks to achieve in The God of Small Things.
The return of several of the characters, in particular the protagonists, Estha and Rahel, to
the site of “cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination” is a
postcolonial revisiting of India’s histories in order to uncover those “ideological
discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven
development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races,
communities”.
Furthermore, researching Amitav Ghosh, who is regarded by the western academy as a
‘postcolonial writer’, has also broadened my understanding of how history is understood
by ‘postcolonial writers’ themselves: their engagement with their cultural histories
through a ‘narrativisation’ of history is essentially concerned with representation rather
that the ‘facticity’ of events.
Like many postcolonial writers, Amitav Ghosh endeavours to recuperate the silenced
voices of those not represented in the historical record. As a member of the Indian
Subaltern Project his fiction is a writing against the colonial belief that history is
dominated by the stories of the elite, and in so doing he foregrounds the experiences of
the Indian subaltern - those who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes. After
listening to Amitav Ghosh’s passionate discourse at the Ubud Writers and Readers
Festival in 2005, on the need to develop a transcultural communication I was inspired to
teach his texts to my Australian students. This research project has given me the
opportunity to visit the western coastal states of Goa and Kerala in order to gather
information on the historical references in Amitav Ghosh’s historiographic fiction, which
is not only concerned with exploring the interstitial nature of cultures from a postcolonial
perspective, but perhaps more importantly, providing a pre-colonial perspective.
In a meeting with Professor Malashri Lal of Delhi University, we discussed the tendency
of postcolonial critics to disregard, or at best, elide pre-colonial histories in their quest to
formulate theories of contemporary inheritances. She also suggested that reading the
‘non-canonical’ postcolonial texts often provide the reader with a clearer vision of
traditional cultures and the sociological forces that have shaped them. Professor Lal’s
advice was reiterated by Dr Fernandes of Goa University, when during a discussion of
colonial and postcolonial texts, he revealed his scepticism in identifying Indian
postcolonial writers with the so called ‘canon’ of postcolonial writers. Most of these
texts, he said, had been written in the period since independence, and particularly since
the Partition and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, and thus a certain “authentic tension”
which is found in the literature of writers such as P.K. Narayan, Mulkaraj Anand and
Raja Rao has been lost. (He referred to these three writers as “the triumvirate of Indian
Literature”.).
Keeping this in mind, I think what Ghosh is trying to establish is a writing position that
bridges or mediates these two histories: the pre-colonial and the postcolonial. By so
doing he illuminates western modernity’s capitalist driven colonial period as just another
intersection in a culture’s histories. Ghosh, who has a PhD in social anthropology from
Oxford, has attracted the interest of ethnographers such as James Clifford, Renato
Resaldo and Clifford Geertz, for his depiction of inter-weaving vi histories through a
literary “excavation” of a pre-colonial world and a post-colonial world. vii In In an Antique
Land, for example, the complex medieval cultural mixing of Egyptian, Hindu, Muslim
and Jewish cultures is explored through a network of trade negotiations across the Indian
Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf and is represented by Ghosh as based upon
mutual mercantile interests rather than power and possession. Contrastingly, Ghosh
represents the Portuguese colonizations along the Malabar coast (specifically Goa and
Kerala) as based upon greed and profit. Ghosh writes, “having long been accustomed to
the tradesman’s rules of bargaining and compromise they [the rulers of the Indian Ocean
ports] tried time and again to reach a compromise with the Europeans” viii only to
discover that the only choice was between resistance and submission. He continues,
“unable to compete in the Indian Ocean trade by purely commercial means, the
Europeans were bent on taking control of it by aggression, pure and distilled, by
unleashing violence on a scale unprecedented on those shores” ix .
In this way through re-imagining history, Ghosh poses a challenge to western
postcolonial versions of cultural histories as discrete and separate. Geertz, in a review of
In an Antique Land, has referred to this mercantile civilization as a “multicultural bazaar” x
which is today “divided like the rest of the globe, into singular and separated national
States”xi. The economic and technological globalisation processes of the late 20th century
and early 21st century are, however, blurring these separations based on nation states and
accelerating the formation of a new ‘postmodern multicultural bazaar’ (which could be
described as the theoretical assumption underlying this report). By restoring the
marginalized or subaltern’s historical representation through the tracing of the slave
Bomma’s story, Ghosh is in a postmodern sense challenging the discrete boundaries
between fiction, travel writing, anthropology and history, thereby redefining our
definitions of what constitutes “History”. This is a clear example of how literature
contributes to the debate between history as knowledge and history as representation xii .
Literature, like all art, can offer a paradigm of order in the chaos of the past. Michael
Ondaatje’s self-reflexive proclamation in his historiographic novel, In the Skin of a Lion,
“Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign
chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become” xiii is reiterated in Arundhati
Roy’s fictive interrogation of history as a way of ordering reality. Both novels can be
categorized as postmodern fiction in the way that they urge the reader to reconsider their
understanding of “History” and acknowledge the mini narratives, or local histories, that
are often elided in the regulatory discourse of the dominant narrative. The thematic
imperative in In the Skin of a Lion is to speak oneself into history: the bridge builder,
Temelcoff’s exhortation to Alice, the nun, to find a voice, “You must talk” xiv is a
recontextualisation of Frantz Fanon’s resistance to racist exploitation, “to speak…means
above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization”. xv
It is interesting to note that like the New Zealand postcolonial writer, Keri Hulme, who
has a voiceless character in The Bone People, (also prescribed in The Retreat from the Global
elective and also an exploration of conflicted identity), Arundhati Roy has a character
who either cannot or will not speak. Estha’s silence – a response to his loss of
ontological security when banished from his mother – functions as a figure for the
experience of dislocation by colonised peoples and the resultant silencing of their ‘voice’.
However, in this example from The God of Small Things, Roy makes the salutary point that
not every oppression against which the oppressed struggle is a postcolonial legacy: as a
post-colonial critic as well as a post-colonial writer Roy’s politics is just as opposed to
discrimination by caste and gender as it is to discrimination by race. It is perhaps
interesting to reflect here on the tendency, so often seen in the intelligentsia of colonised
peoples, to rationalise colonial rule as an agency of liberalisation in colonial histories.
Even if not overtly thematisised, this does constitute a cultural crisis in the national
imagination and should not be ignored when discussing post-colonial texts.
Ondaatje and Roy share the same epigraph (borrowed from John Berger’s novel G) at
the beginning of their respective novels: ‘Never again will a single story be told as though
it were the only one’, thus alerting the reader to a self-conscious undermining of the
novelist’s traditional function of colonising the reader. Meaning is made by the reader of
texts, whether they are literary texts or historical texts.
By ensuring our students are aware of how meaning is made through different reading
positions and different interpretations we can compare and contrast these different
readings and try to understand how and why readers choose them. The pedagogic
imperative for the English teaching and learning program is for students to realise that
how we read is as important as what we read.
The inclusion of post-colonial studies in the curricula of the western academy has
facilitated this process, and it is precisely this that has made my study tour possible. The
more I talk to people and the more I read the more certain I am that cultural
identification is the most important variable in the mix of variables that constitute a
‘reading position’. However, given the cultural interaction of our increasingly globalising
culture, cultural identification is characterised by a quality of fluidity. Stuart Hall’s
contention that, “cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of
identification or suture, which are made within the discourses of history and culture. Not
an essence but a positioning” xvi helped me to clarify post-colonial writers’ motives. The
cultural practices of diasporic communities are not necessarily restricted by loyalties to
nation states – indeed they illustrate the fact that cultural practices are NOT tied to a
specific place but might be said to “exist within the hybrid spaces opened up by cultural
translation”. xvii And as these spaces become increasingly connected in a global web they
constitute the new emergent global culture which has, to borrow a phrase from Clifford,
“a hybrid authenticity” xviii of its own.
Conclusion
The debate concerning the cult of authenticity, represented in Rushdie’s Imaginary
Homelands, as that between regionalism and cosmopolitanism seems to me to be
organically connected to the issues explored in diasporic studies. My research has
provided a rubric for the teaching of the Extension courses. Furthermore, my research
has “returned” literature to the foreground of the courses. I was beginning to wonder
whether I was teaching Cultural Studies and not English Literature. In particular, the
literary debate as to whose voice best represents local interests and the cultural
dislocation felt by local groups - metropolitan elites or regional writers - has provided a
literary context for the exploration of local and global issues in both my Preliminary
Extension course and the HSC courses.
Contemporary postcolonial writers such as Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Bharati Mukherjee,
Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Gita Mehta, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, Monica Ali and
Jhumpa Lahiri each write from the perspective of one who, in the words of Michael
Ondaatje “is born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or
away from our homelands all our lives” xix. The relevance for teaching such writers in the
multicultural English classroom in NSW is that students are compelled to engage with
culture, not from the perspective of aesthetics, but rather as an “uneven, incomplete
production of meaning and value, often composed of incommensurable demands and
practices, produced in the act of social survival” xx .
When students are told that they inhabit a multicultural society xxi, what does this mean to
them? Mutually exclusive cultures cohabiting in the same country? The Tamworth fiasco?
The Cronulla Riots? The Australian Tennis Open Brawl? Church leaders denigrating
other faiths? The Griffiths murder? The Palm Island controversy?
Pessimistic views, such as William Routh’s assertion, in An Australian Film Reader, that
“not being sure of who you are is practically the dictionary definition of being
Australian” xxii need not result in morbid definitions of national identity (apart from the
political agendas of self serving politicians). A culture defines itself through the Other,
that is, it knows how to recognise itself through its mix of customs, rituals and myths
which differentiate it from other cultures. However, cultures often have customs, rituals
and myths in common. Notwithstanding the fact that each of us is (an) Other, we surely
have enough common affiliations to accept that collectively we participate in the sociopolitical project xxiii that is Australia.
A more sanguine view is presented by Homi Bhaba. He believes that it is in the
“interstitial passage between fixed identifications” xxiv that questions of “solidarity and
community” xxv lead to “political empowerment and the enlargement of the
multiculturalist cause”. xxvi In rejecting the notion of an already established cultural
position, he suggests social differences are “signs of the emergence of community
envisaged as a project - at once a vision and a construction – that takes you ‘beyond’
yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political
conditions of the present” xxvii .
However, in today’s world the question of identity, both individual ethnic identity and
national cultural identity is further complicated by the modern processes of globalisation
– those scientific, religious, philosophical or economic paradigms which are continually
reshaping and reinventing our world and which inform the “political conditions of the
present”. Furthermore, gender, race, ethnicity, class and citizenship are all categories of
identification which constitute the “political conditions” of the local and are thereby sites
of global/local contestation. English syllabuses can provide a context for students to
safely explore these issues: it is in the pages of literature that we can engage with, in
Homi Bhabha’s words, “those who have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation,
domination, diaspora, displacement [and] learn our most enduring lessons for living and
thinking” xxviii .
The positive implications of teaching postcolonial texts is further supported by Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin who suggest that most postcolonial writing regards the hybridized
nature of postcolonial culture as a strength rather than a weakness xxix .Indeed, we can see
that in postcolonial Australia, despite the widespread annihilation of indigenous cultures,
the waves of migrants over the past two hundred years have produced social practices
which form a complex cultural palimpsest which is the envy of the world. This is our
national strength. To suggest that there is only one Australian way is an attempt to
rewrite history – again. Multiculturalism IS a social fact – in the world, in Australia, in my
classroom.
My research has, I believe, strengthened my belief in, and commitment to, the role of
literature in developing our students’ self-awareness and helping them to negotiate a
changing world.
Notes
i An
excellent exposition of the standoff between the “exotic” and the “regional” in postcolonial writing
can be found in Vikram Chandra’s article, The Cult of Authenticity, freely available on the web. See
http://bostonreview.net/BR25.1/chandra.html
ii ibid.
iii Australian Welcome for Indian Migrants,
http://newsvote.bbc.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/53...
iv For an analysis of how English literature was used as a form of control by the British Raj see
Viswanathan, Gauri. 1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India . London: Faber & Faber.
v Bhabha,, Homi. 2003. The Location of Culture. Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk: Routledge, 171.
vi ‘weaving’ is used in Ghosh’s novel The Circle of Reason as a metaphor for the intertwining and
interdependence of middle-eastern and south Asian cultures over a seven hundred year period - from the
10thcentury to the 16th Century.
vii Comparisons can be drawn between Seamus Heaney’s use of ‘digging’ as a metaphor to excavate
occluded Irish Gaelic histories. (This comparison is useful for the Retreat from the Global elective.)
viii Ghosh, Amitav.1992. In an Antique Land. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. 287-8.
ibid.
Comparisons can be made with the English in India. During the ‘occupancy’ by the East India Company.
Race relations were generally harmonious and intermarriage was a normal occurrence. However, after the
British Government took control of the company, race relations gradually deteriorated, until 1857 saw the
First War of Independence which was followed in 1857 by the appointment of a Viceroy. The British Raj
began and continued for the next hundred years. William Dalrymple’s two books, The White Mughals and
The Last Mughal provide an illuminating historical reconstruction of this period as well as positing the claim
that prior to 1857 religious tolerance was practiced and the 1857 war was a “war of religion” which has
a resonance in today’s fundamentalist struggles for supremacy.
x
Cited by Robert Dixon in ‘Travelling in the West’ in Khair Tabish ed. 2003. Amitav Ghosh. New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 26.
xi
ibid.
xii Ghosh’s pre-eminent position in Indian writing has been recognized by his recent inclusion, along with
the legendary Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray (who incidentally are both from Bengal) into the Class XI
Elective English syllabus of the country's biggest secondary board — the Central Board of Secondary
Education in India.
From 2007, two books by Ghosh have been included in the list of prescribed books, one of which must be
taught as the compulsory text in the fiction category.
It is also interesting to note that the only Indian films to be included in the board's list of movies are from
Ray's trilogy, Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar. The NSW syllabuses, of course have a much larger
national content.
There are of course those critics who believe the authentic voice of Indian writers is to be found in the
Hindu language or regional languages. This debate, which is essentially concerned with the global local
nexus, has been referred to elsewhere in this article. Suffice it to say that India is a diglossic society where
English is one of the two official languages in each state. (There are more Indian speakers of English than
there are English national speakers of English!)
xiii Ondaatje, Michael. 1988. In The Skin of a Lion. London: Picador, 146.
xiv ibid, 37.
xv Fanon, Franz. 1967. Black Skin White Masks. St Albans, Herts: Granada.
xvi Hall, Stuart. 1993. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader.
Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf; New York:
Columbia University Press, 256.
xvii Huggan, Graham. 2001. The Post Colonial Exotic. London: Routledge, 26.
xviii Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard: Harvard
University Press, 185.
xix Ondaatje, Michael.1992. The English Patient. London: Picador, 176
xx Bhabha, op. cit. 172.
xxi Amartya Sen, the Indian Nobel prize winning economist, writing in The New Republic (18/2/2006)
constructs an interesting analysis of multiculturism and what he calls ‘plural monoculturalism’. In the article
he offers some challenging thoughts on social segregations caused by segmented schooling policies. This
article can be viewed at http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060227&s=sen022706&c=2
xxii Routh, William. An Australian Film Reader. Quoted by Aninda Basu Roy in “Reviewing the Bush Legend:
Australian Cinema and Nation Formation” a paper delivered at conference: Globalisation and Postcolonial
Writing. Calcutta University 2006.
xxiii Homi Bhabba defines ‘project’ as “at once a vision and a construction” (see endnote 60 below)
xxiv Bhabha, op. cit. 3.
xxv ibid.
xxvi ibid.
xxvii ibid.
xxviii Ibid. 172.
xxix Ashcroft B, Griffiths G, Tiffin H ed. 1999. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 183.
ix