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DC Field | Value | Language |
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dc.contributor.advisor | Goellnicht, Donald | - |
dc.contributor.author | Kabesh, Lisa | - |
dc.date.accessioned | 2014-11-19T20:59:51Z | - |
dc.date.available | 2014-11-19T20:59:51Z | - |
dc.date.issued | 2014-11 | - |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/16459 | - |
dc.description.abstract | 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? | en_US |
dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
dc.subject | Asian Canadian Literature | en_US |
dc.subject | Pedagogy | en_US |
dc.subject | Canadian Literature | en_US |
dc.subject | Social Justice | en_US |
dc.subject | Trauma Fiction | en_US |
dc.subject | Risk | en_US |
dc.subject | Ecological Justice | en_US |
dc.subject | Detective Fiction | en_US |
dc.title | Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian Canadian Literature | en_US |
dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
dc.contributor.department | English and Cultural Studies | en_US |
dc.description.degreetype | Dissertation | en_US |
dc.description.degree | Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) | en_US |
dc.description.layabstract | 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. | en_US |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Kabesh_Lisa_M_Post-DefenseSubmission2014Sept_PhD.pdf | Dissertation | 1.02 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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