HARTWIGER, ALEXANDER, Ph.D. Cosmopolitan Pedagogy

222 Pages·2010·0.65 MB·English

HARTWIGER, ALEXANDER, Ph.D. Cosmopolitan Pedagogy: Reading Postcolonial
Literature in an Age of Globalization. (2010)
Directed by Hephzibah Roskelly and Alexandra Schultheis. 215 pp.

This project extends debates about cosmopolitanism to the classroom by defining a
cosmopolitan pedagogy that fosters students’ ethical engagement with difference. By
reimagining cosmopolitanism in a pedagogical space, I build a counter-hegemonic
cosmopolitanism which disrupts totalizing narratives of Enlightenment modernity and
open a location for alternative epistemologies. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang
Iser, and Louise Rossenblatt, I reconfigure contemporary reading theory to face the
challenges of engaging with postcolonial literature in an era of globalization. Readings
of key postcolonial texts, including Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, and Chris Abani’s
GraceLand, provide insight into the way cosmopolitanism works to construct community
out of the shared sense of alienation that arises in the postcolony in an age of
globalization. Through postcolonial theorists Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, and
Simon Gikandi, I argue that the unhomely cosmopolitan comes to represent the displaced
figure of globalization but whose presence interrupts the narrative of development
constructed through colonial modernity. Ultimately, a cosmopolitan pedagogy makes the
classroom an unhomely space which disrupts knowledge production and consumption,
challenging students to be responsible for their participation in those processes. In asking
students to be accountable for and respond to the call of the other, this project helps
students build the skills necessary to ethically engage with difference inside and outside
the classroom.
COSMOPOLITAN PEDAGOGY: READING
POSTOCLONIAL LITERATURE IN
AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

by

Alexander Hartwiger

A Dissertation Submitted to
the Faculty of The Graduate School at
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy

Greensboro
2010

Approved by

______________________________
Committee Co-chair

______________________________
Committee Co-chair
To Asel Asleh

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APPROVAL PAGE

This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The

Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Committee Co-chair __________________________________________
Hephzibah Roskelly

Committee Co-chair __________________________________________
Alexandra Schultheis

Committee Members _________________________________________
Nancy Myers

____________________________
Date of Acceptance by Committee

____________________________
Date of Final Oral Examination
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I offer thanks and gratitude to my entire committee for the support, suggestions, and
insight. Special recognition goes to Belinda Walzer whose countless hours of
conversation and continued faith in the project kept me inspired. Heidi Hartwiger’s
willingness to read at a moment’s notice was a welcomed assurance that I never
overlooked the fine details.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………...1

II. COUNTER HEGEMONIC COSMOPOLITANISM: REIMGAINING
COSMOPOLITANISM IN A PEDAGOGICAL SPACE………………….14

III. COSMOPOLITAN PEDAGOGY: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE………67

IV. IMAGINATION: CULTIVATING COSMOPOLITAN CLASSROOM
COMMUNITIES…………………………………………………………..120

V. THE UNHOMELY COSMOPOLITAN: ADRIFT IN THE GLOBAL
PUBLIC SPHERE…………………………………………………………170

AFTERWARD………………………………………………………………………….206

WORKS CITED...……...………………………………………………………………208
CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The Classroom in the World and the World in the Classroom

In the fall of 2002, I was in India in the rural town of Paud in the state of Maharastra,
teaching at an international school of 200 students representing 68 different nationalities.
I recall the day I introduced Heart of Darkness to my class of 22 students, and the
amazement I had at being in a classroom in India teaching a Polish born novelist who
wrote in English about a fictionalized African journey to students from Europe, Africa,
North America, and Asia. The novel elicited useful, and at times frank, conversation
about colonialism’s impact and legacy on the world and created a site for students to
speak to one another through the specifics of the text. It was the first time I realized the
power of literature to open dialogue across difference to help students move from the
fixity of particular points of view to fluid positions which provided insightful and ever-
changing vantage points. It was not the literature in and of itself which created this
situation, but it was the experience of the literary engagement, the very act of reading, in
such a diverse and challenging environment that enabled students to orientate themselves
to others and otherness in productive and instructional ways.
My experiences at the Mahindra United World College of India taught me the
importance of bringing the world into the classroom and seeing the classroom in the
world. What I would like to suggest is that literature serves as the nexus point between
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the two. I argue that we must recognize the possibilities for pedagogy to be an
intervention in the world, disrupting, disquieting, and destabilizing familiar narratives
that reduce the world to prefabricated realities or master narratives. The aim of this
project is to create a pedagogical approach to literature1 which opens a space for dialogue
between reader and text, necessitating an ethics of responsibility for difference. While all
classroom environments might not be like the one I had in India, there are particular
pedagogical practices, which I call a cosmopolitan pedagogy, that can result in the same
outcome. Cosmopolitan pedagogy entails a commitment to the act of reading as an act of
engagement with the world. Through the four chapters, I move between literary analysis,
cosmopolitan theory, and practical pedagogy to give a comprehensive expression of how
a cosmopolitan pedagogy works and what it can offer students. I locate my project in the
postcolonial literature course as a way to access a set of problems that shape our current
geo-political landscape and challenge students to engage with difference.
Making the Invisible Visible

Globalization has spread its economic, social, and political nets across the planet,
creating one world, albeit a deeply disproportionate one. In defining globalization, I am
working from the supposition that this is not just an economic force, but also one that
mediates flows of culture, law, and politics. Additionally, it can be characterized as “‘the
intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way
that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away or vice versa’”

1 In this project, I work from a more restrictive view of literature. Rather than thinking of literature simply
as working with letters, I choose to think of it in J. Hillis Miller’s terms as a way of knowing. My definition
of literature is not a value based one, but rather predicated on the need for imaginative engagement with a
text.
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(Giddens qtd. in Gupta). The historically unparalleled amount of contact between peoples
generated by globalization has spawned a new set of problems for our global community.
Rather than bringing individuals together to embrace difference as such, globalization’s
centrifugal forces often reduce or assimilate difference into dominant cultures, creating
intensely asymmetrical power structures. The result is that globalization often works in
one direction, the global north forcing its economic and cultural influence on the global
south, negating the opportunity for equal exchange between peoples. The fallout of this
uneven relationship permeates all aspects of society and the world. The increase of
hybrid identities, diasporic populations, and migratory labor, which result from
globalization, necessitates the challenge of making interstitial spaces visible and livable.
The monolithic categories that served as primary identities for so long, such as
nationality, race, religion, etc., no longer adequately represent the dynamic nature of
individual identity. However, we have not found an appropriate way to recognize these
voices in-between. In the United States, the multicultural movement worked toward
recognition of minority and disenfranchised voices, but the limitations of this theory
within globalized discourses ultimately renders it dated and ineffectual.
Cosmopolitanism has come to represent the follow up to multiculturalism, achieving
multiculturalism’s goals more effectively.
Cosmopolitan Pedagogy: Reading Postcolonial Literature in an Age of Globalization
rests at the crossroads of several disciplines and challenges some of the fundamental
approaches with which teachers have operated until now when working with non-
Western literature. This project offers a critique of the popular reading models utilized in
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postcolonial classrooms, and it suggests a new way of approaching difference through a
cosmopolitan framework. I draw from well-established reading theory, including work
by Mikhail Bhaktin, Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt, and Mary Louise Pratt, and read
their work through a cosmopolitan lens in order to adapt it for reading literature in an age
of globalization. Building from these theorists allows me the opportunity to work from
canonical critical positions, adjusting them in order to meet today’s classroom demands.
Cosmopolitanism has been and continues to be at the center of contentious debates
concerning diversity, identity, and ethics. Entering this milieu with a pedagogical
perspective in order to bridge the gap between cosmopolitan theory and contemporary
critical pedagogy provides an alternative reading model that responds to the challenges
that globalization raises for students. To accomplish this task, I turn to current and
emerging cosmopolitan theory, incorporating Anthony Appiah’s “rooted
cosmopolitanism,” Martha Nussbaum’s argument for a cosmopolitan education and
Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ counter hegemonic cosmopolitanism. Putting the work of
these three theorists in conversation helps me to create an unhomely cosmopolitanism
which when situated in the classroom realizes my pedagogical goals of decentering
power, destabilizing positionality, and fostering ethical engagement. This concept of the
unhomely provides the unmooring of students and texts from fixed positions and opens,
in Homi Bhabha’s terms, a Third Space from which to interact. This universal condition
of unhomeliness provides the counter-hegemonic cosmopolitan link between reader and
text.
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