Cultural Politics in the Literature Classroom

The first part of this book looks at how the
instructor s identity, whether students construct it
as academically or culturally authoritative or both,
plays an active role in the interpretation of
multicultural literary texts. To encourage students
direct engagement with a text and its world, outlined
here is a pedagogy that temporarily displaces
teacherly authority so that students build the
knowledge necessary to analyze a literary work. This
practice encourages students to use their own
experiences, the social text of the classroom and the
context of a work to build meaning from and about a
literary text.
The second part of this book examines the mixed-race
characters in the novels of Toni Morrison. The
characters of Soaphead Church (The Bluest Eye),
Golden Gray (Jazz) and Pat Best (Paradise) revise the
tragic mulatto stereotype found in nineteenth century
U.S. literature. Like Pauline Hopkins, author of
turn-of-the-century race melodramas, Morrison
complicates notions of mulatto identity. Further, as
hybrid subjects, each character literally manifests
W.E.B. Du Bois s notion of the color line and
transforms that narrow space into one of creativity
and autonomy.

Auteur
AnnaMarie Christiansen received her Doctor of Arts in English from Idaho State University. Her research interests include Oceanic literatures, African-American literature, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Born in Australia and raised on the U.S. mainland, Dr. Christiansen is tribally affiliated with the Nga Puhi of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Texte du rabat
The first part of this book looks at how the instructor's identity, whether students construct it as academically or culturally authoritative or both, plays an active role in the interpretation of multicultural literary texts. To encourage students' direct engagement with a text and its world, outlined here is a pedagogy that temporarily displaces teacherly authority so that students build the knowledge necessary to analyze a literary work. This practice encourages students to use their own experiences, the social text of the classroom and the context of a work to build meaning from and about a literary text. The second part of this book examines the mixed-race characters in the novels of Toni Morrison. The characters of Soaphead Church (The Bluest Eye), Golden Gray (Jazz) and Pat Best (Paradise) revise the tragic mulatto stereotype found in nineteenth century U.S. literature. Like Pauline Hopkins, author of turn-of-the-century race melodramas, Morrison complicates notions of mulatto identity. Further, as hybrid subjects, each character literally manifests W.E.B. Du Bois's notion of the color line and transforms that narrow space into one of creativity and autonomy.