Annamarie Christiansen

Cultural Politics in the Literature Classroom & Toni Morrison's Novels Annamarie Christiansen

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.