Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian Canadian Literature

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?