CANADIAN SOCIAL STUDIES
VOLUME 36, NUMBER 3, SPRING 2002

Culture, Gender, Representation and Response: High School Students Interacting with Texts

Jyoti Mangat

University of Alberta

Abstract

This paper examines issues of strategic readings of multicultural literature taken up by two young women of East Indian heritage in a Canadian high school. In their responses to Bharati Mukherjee's "The Management of Grief", these two students illuminate the complexities of the intersections of multiculturalism, gender and cultural translation through reading practices. Implications for social studies and history teachers include the suggestion that multiple interrogations of curricular texts must be engaged in by students in order to gain a variety of perspectives.

 

In this paper, I would like to take up some issues surrounding the intersections of culture, gender and representation in a contemporary Canadian school setting. This discussion is grounded in research I conducted where I interviewed ten Canadian high school students about their responses to Bharati Mukherjee's short story, "The Management of Grief" (1988). The original intent of the study was to interrogate ways in which readers' cultural backgrounds might inform their readings of a 'multicultural' literary text. Here, however, I would like to focus on the responses of two young women of East Indian heritage that provide perspectives on Homi Bhaba's assertion that:

Hybridization is not some happy consensual mix of diverse cultures; it is the strategic, translational transfer of tone, value, signification, and position - a transfer of power - from an authoritative system of cultural hegemony to an emergent process of cultural location and reiteration… (in Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 370)

Bhaba's notion of hybridization as a strategic transfer of power is supported by the tensions and complexities that surround issues of ethnicity and gender in a contemporary 'multicultural' location.

Many of these tensions and complexities emerged during this study of students' responses to a specific text and the implications for teachers of the humanities are significant. While this study focuses on a literary work, issues of how students read and respond to texts are equally relevant for social studies teachers. For teachers, the consideration of how students read and respond to a text as a way of taking up issues of representation means finding a variety of ways of approaching a text so that one perspective is not privileged over the multiplicity of readings that are possible.

This research was conducted in a predominantly white, middle-class suburb of a western Canadian city where I was also an English and Social Studies teacher in one of the school district's two high schools. The respondents, who voluntarily participated in the study and who were given pseudonyms to maintain anonymity, were grade eleven and twelve students enrolled in either International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement English classes at each of the two high schools. Five students (three girls and two boys) were of European heritages and five (again, three girls and two boys) were of East Indian backgrounds. In this suburban community of 50 000 people, described as one of my research participants as "so not culturally diverse," it was somewhat difficult to find five young people with East Indian heritages. Indeed, the same student, a sixteen-year-old Indo-Canadian female, revealed that her older sister told her that "going to University was a culture shock. Coming from [here], you don't even think of yourself as Indian exactly. She said that she had never seen so many culturally different people in one room. She was shocked."

The two students I would like to focus on here are both young women of East Indian heritages. Both Meena, who described her ethnic background as being south Indian and Hindu, and Simi, who described hers as being north Indian and Hindu, were sixteen-year-old grade eleven students at the same school. Before the individual interviews they were asked to read "The Management of Grief" and consider a number of questions [Appendix A] as possible points of discussion or response.

Bharati Mukherjee's short story "The Management of Grief" is about the effects of the 1985 Air India bombing on Toronto's East Indian community and specifically on the central character and narrator, Mrs. Shaila Bhave, who loses her husband and two sons in the terrorist act. The narrator appears to be coping well with the tragedy and she is asked by a government social worker, Judith Templeton, "to help as an intermediary - or, in official Ontario Ministry of Citizenship terms, a 'cultural interpreter' (Cairncross vii) - between the bereaved immigrant communities and the social service agencies" (Bowen 1997, 48). Bowen also explains that:

Judith is caught between worlds; she does not know how to translate the grief she shares with Shaila and the Indian community into cultural specifics that will be acceptable to both Indian and Western modes of thought. Shaila is initially caught, too, between different impulses coming from different cultural models which she has internalized within her self. The question of how to effect moral agency while practising the acceptance of difference is in both instances a tricky one. (1997, 49)

Both women occupy roles as translators and interpreters between two cultures, roles that are both difficult and uncomfortable. Shaila, however, is the "dislocated mourner" (Bowen 1997, 59) who must manage her own grief and that of others. Her sense of dislocation leads her on a journey that takes her from Canada to Ireland to India and back to Canada. Upon her return to Toronto, according to Bowen (1997), "Shaila is a figure for productive cultural hybridity. Standing on the translator's threshold, looking in both directions, she comes to possess the power to understand her liminality as itself a space for 'effective (moral) agency' (Mohanty 116)" (58).

This story was particularly appropriate for my study because of the very issues of cultural translation discussed by Bowen. Since I was most interested in the personal responses of students to the story and the ways in which they came to an interpretation of the text's meaning for themselves, the story provided a useful way of thinking about questions of textual representations, responses and cultures. Where Shaila, the story's protagonist, acts as a "cultural translator" between various members of Toronto's Indian community and the government of Ontario, readers of the story act as translators between the culture of the story and their own cultural backgrounds. In addition, the contemporary resonances of the tragedy, with the on-going RCMP investigations into the crime, subsequent arrests and preparations for what is most likely to be the most expensive trial in Canadian history have ensured that the story, both fictional and real, has not been far from our consciousness.

When I asked the participants in my study to share their initial responses to the story, Meena and Simi each expressed a discomfort with what she perceived as cultural stereotypes presented in the text. For example, Meena's first comment to me was "Why did it have to be a story about an Indian person, instead of just a person?" Both of these young women revealed the most unease of all the interviewees with several of the cultural references in the story. Simi expressed her concern in the following terms:

There were a lot of cultural references to Indian culture and [an] Indian way of life and I think that if other people read the story they're going to think that Indian culture is a certain way. People already have lots of stereotypes about Asia and the East and the Orient and I think that the story just further implements the stereotypes.

Simi's comments are further illuminated in Meena's observations in relation to a brief discussion she and I had regarding the recent 'trendiness' of India in North American popular culture. I asked Meena how she felt about the following trends: pop star Madonna adorning her hands with mendhi (henna) and the availability, suddenly, of this "herbal tattooing" at national drugstore chains; the fashion trend toward pashmina (a fine grade of cashmere) shawls; sari fabric appearing as throw pillows and window dressings; Gwen Stefani of the band "No Doubt" performing in most of her music videos wearing a bindi on her forehead; and numerous other examples of Indian (particularly North Indian) culture on the "What's Hot" lists (and the next year, the "What's Not" lists) of such publications as In Style magazine. In an insight she attributes to discussions with her older sister, who is working towards an MA, 16-year-old Meena expressed her ambivalence toward popular culture's interest in India in these terms:

I can't justify to myself why I don't really agree with it, but I was talking to my sister who is studying Orientalism at university, [Edward] Said and stuff, and she was saying…that maybe it's because people are kind of exoticising it, like when you see people with mendhi on their hands or a bindi you see them as kind of ultra-trendy or kind of different from everyone else, and they're exoticising something I find kind of normal…it's interesting because a lot of times you don't agree with the way you're portrayed in the culture, but you can't exactly say why…it's not really an offensive portrayal, but you just don't agree…Orientalism helps to explain that feeling.

Through their comments, these young women demonstrate a negotiation of identity that involves being both similar to and different from the cultural mainstream: they are, at once, both visible and invisible and occupy a space of liminality, much like the story's narrator. As two of a dozen or so "visible minority" students in a school population of a thousand, these young women were, indeed, visible; however, by virtue the fact that both had been raised in this suburban, middle-class community and were fluent in the cultural norms of the community, often their "different-ness was invisible" (Khyatt 1994, 8). Their readings of "The Management of Grief" appear to be part of this "double consciousness…that seeks cultural translation…to assert that there is a positive, agential value in the whole process of surviving domination" (Seshadri-Crooks 2000, 370).
Both Simi and Meena insisted that they liked Mukherjee's story, but both wished "there weren't so many generalisations about India." This double consciousness was also at work in a readerly way: they were at once reading the story as "culturally proximate" readers who have access to elements of cultural specificity in the work, and as "culturally distant" readers who are unfamiliar with the setting and events of the story (Larsen & Lásló 1990, 428). They appeared to be reading the story as both 'brown' and 'white' readers, both marginal and mainstream at the same time, and their concerns were less with their own understandings and interpretations of the story than with possible misreadings of the story by others. Like Shaila, these two readers appeared to be concerned with using their multiple subject positions in effective and agential ways.

Meena continued the discussion to say that she wished that the story was less "culturally specific…like you never hear a 'typical American tradition is….' There's no such thing as 'typical.' It's actually making a generalisation…if people see an Indian person generalising about their culture other people think they can too." Simi echoed Meena's concern when she worried that the presence of an Indian narrator created a sense of India as a cultural monolith: "Oh, 'in India…' or this is 'the Indian way', [the narrator] always says that…being that the main character is from India makes it seem like all Indians are that way."

When I asked the European-Canadian students to comment on the possibility that stereotypes might be confirmed by the story they appeared unconcerned with the notion that readers might walk away from the story with unsubstantiated beliefs about India; however, some validity might be lent to Meena and Simi's concerns in the light of one young man's statement that at the end of the story he "totally wanted to know what was custom and what was reaction." Interestingly, the European-Canadian students' general lack of concern about the question of the danger of stereotyping is consistent with the observation by Pieterse (1992) that:

In as far as stereotypes form part of the psychological and cultural furniture of those in society's mainstream, to criticize them is to undermine the comforts of the mainstream existence. From the point of view of the comfortable strata of society, and those who aspire to join them, no problem exists; there is a problem only from the point of view of those on the margins. (12)

It is also significant to observe that these Indo-Canadian females were the readers who were the most passionately concerned with this issue of stereotyping and representation. It is possible that as non-white young women they brought a heightened awareness of issues of marginality to their readings of this story and that they were occupying politically conscious subject positions in their discussions of issues of representation and 'authenticity.'

These two young women occupied complex spaces in their school community: they did not identify themselves as feeling marginalized on the basis of either their gender or their ethnicity; in fact, they were active participants in the school's mainstream as members of the students' union, several sports teams and a variety of other aspects of their school's extracurricular life. Despite this appearance of being closer to the centre than the margins of their school community, Meena and Simi each responded to this text in a manner that suggests an awareness of marginalized perspectives.

The young women I have highlighted here have engaged, perhaps unconsciously, in a form of Bhabha's notion of hybridization as the strategic negotiation of power. In their readings and discussions of "The Management of Grief" the occasion presented itself for these young women to comment on issues of significance to them, most specifically the question of representation, and in this particular setting - one-on-one interviews with me - they made themselves visible and took the strategic opportunity to "speak as" young, visible minority females (Spivak & Gunew 1993, 194). And, as Spivak states, "the real demand is that, when I speak from that position, I should be listened to seriously" (Spivak & Gunew 1993, 194).

While this study focused on a literary text and students' responses to it, the suggestion that students' multiperspectival readings should be listened to seriously remains relevant to social studies and history teaching. Students in all humanities courses read and respond to texts and these texts, as a function of their use of language, are representational of history, culture and ideology. These issues of representation and the fear of misrepresentation were taken up by Meena and Simi, both of whom expressed an ambivalence about whether they would want to have studied "The Management of Grief" in their classes. On the one hand, they would have been happy to have read works that included perspectives other than the dominant, mainstream ones that were the norm; on the other hand, they were concerned with the possibility that their classmates would see those singular representations as fixed and 'true'.

In recent years, humanities curricula have placed an increased emphasis on the notion of "critical thinking" with the aim that students might develop the skills to decode the assumptions underlying a text; however, there seems to have been an omission of the corresponding requirement that readers decode their own assumptions. By paying attention to the ways in which students read and respond to representations of women and cultural minorities in history and social studies textbooks, teachers have access to a variety of readings that interact with the often singular perspective of a given text. And by privileging multiplicity over singularity, teachers and students have ready tools against the dangers of the often limited understandings of gender, culture and identity presented in curricular materials.