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

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.