Against the Grain: Teaching Multicultural Literature to Middle Class Values

Myra Mendible
Associate Professor
Florida Gulf Coast University
E-mail: mendible@fgcu.edu

Florida's tenth state university, Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) in Ft. Myers, opened its doors in the fall of 1997 with approximately 2600 students. Even before construction was completed on the 760 acres of cypress swamp selected to house the new university, new faculty and staff began relocating to the area, many from cosmopolitan cities, transforming the face of this mid-size Florida city forever. Hired in 1994 as one of two faculty tasked with developing the English program, I was fortunate to engage firsthand in a project that would stimulate not only educational and economic development in the region but also cultural and social changes. This essay shares some of my experiences as a founding faculty member, focusing on our efforts to implement a multicultural curriculum in a predominantly white, middle-class community.

Designing a literary studies program for a new university at the end of the twentieth century posed special challenges, both in terms of late-twentieth century cultural politics and in the context of Southwest Florida. The so-called "culture wars" of the 80s and 90s had transformed how university English departments defined themselves and their missions. As a result, multicultural and inter-disciplinary approaches were replacing the segmentation of knowledge that had traditionally structured university curricula generally and expanded the scope of English department study and research in particular. My colleague and I, fresh out of graduate school, thus embarked on an exciting and risky business. We understood the significant role our choices would play in the region's cultural machinery: our decisions would help shape aesthetic tastes, legitimize certain authors and grant authority to their texts, inform or challenge ideologies, and establish student learning outcomes and goals. We suspected that administrative shifts, economic imperatives, and demographics might later affect the scope and number of innovative course offerings. We also knew that the word "multiculturalism" still elicited knee-jerk reactions on campuses and at dinner tables across the country.

In Southwest Florida, demographics helped to explain our students' discomfort when first introduced to issues of race, class, and ethnicity in the classroom. Florida Gulf Coast University was founded in a city that had been recently cited in a national study as the eleventh most residentially segregated in the South (Rinella). Out of approximately 2600 students enrolled in our spring semester at FGCU, only 289 were African American and Latino, although these nationalities comprise the two largest minority groups in the United States. Another kind of segregation resulted from Ft. Myers' reputation as a retirement community: despite the influx of younger families into the area over the years, the city's cultural infrastructure had yet to catch up to its emerging population. Thus there were relatively few places where mixed groups of young people could gather for intellectual and cultural exchanges. As a result of this demographic, the new University represented the principle environment where a white, middle-class majority could encounter a broad range of views and perspectives. These factors made our imperative to broaden minds and build bridges even more daunting.

Our initial brainstorming sessions as a college acknowledged this challenge and responsibility. Led by the creative efforts of our founding dean, we began by creating a Liberal Studies core curriculum that would institutionalize our commitment to interdisciplinarity, multicultural awareness, and environmental sustainability. The result was the Collegium of Integrated Studies, which consisted of six issues-based courses intended to develop students' interdisciplinary research and problem-solving skills. Rather than isolating upper division students within the more familiar and comfortable boundaries of their majors, the Collegium required all students to bring their discipline's perspectives and skills to bear on selected issues in science, culture, media, economics, and technology. Students examined a broad range of controversies through a multicultural lens spanning disciplinary, social, and political terrain. They were expected to confront tough contemporary problems; explore root causes; make connections among various factors; and offer sensible, informed and sustainable solutions or alternatives.

Because all Liberal Arts students were required to complete 18 hours in the Collegium of Integrated Study, in addition to the coursework in their principle areas of study (referred to as "concentrations" rather than majors), many students resented these courses. Given that our first crop of students was predominantly "non-traditional," some were single parents, the majority tended to work full time, and all were anxious to complete their degrees. They saw these classes as an impediment to graduation, arguing that the Collegium was "unnecessary" or superfluous to their particular field or career objectives. This resistance often spilled over into our individual programs, making mainstream students even less anxious to study non-canonical texts or marginal cultures. But we were convinced that, in many cases, these multicultural and multidisciplinary investigations--and the debates they generated--offered perhaps the only opportunity our mainstream students would have to "hear" another side of the story.

Joan Didion reminds us that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live" (11), and I've come to believe that students' initial resistance to multicultural texts had less to do with ethnic or racial prejudices than with the challenge these stories posed to their own story-making. Teaching against the grain in this sense meant recognizing that class-antagonism in our students represented a collision of competing stories, that what we call "middle-class values" are simply twice-told tales which inform our self-image and "tell us how to live." As shared stories we tell ourselves, they are a powerful force in shaping our perspectives and marking our boundaries. Maurice Halbwachs contends that collective stories form the basis of both personal and cultural identity and help to define our membership in a particular group. Given the primacy of oral histories in the formation of national identity, it is not surprising that competing groups maintain a selective archive of cultural memories to fashion a positive, self-serving identity inspired by their collective history but creatively embellished by memory. As historian Charles Maier points out, memory "mingles private and public spheres ... [and] conflates vast historical occurrences with the most interior consciousness" (50). Through this sharing of memories and telling of stories, we define our sense of community and foster our connection through blood and history.

For these reasons, my colleague and I made multicultural texts an integral, not merely a decorative, aspect of the English program curriculum. For example, all English majors were required a certain number of courses in contemporary culture, all of which integrated relevant discussions of class, race, gender, and ethnicity. This insistence on some analysis of recent texts and issues was meant to counter the kind of "canon idolatry" that we had both experienced in our own educations and which tended to consign the status of "literature" only to works written by the proverbial "dead white men." A required introductory course for the major set the groundwork for subsequent multicultural reading and analysis, introducing students to key developments in English studies and to a variety of theoretical approaches. And, in all of our classes, we encouraged students to explore the nooks and crannies of any dominant cultural movement--to recognize, for example, that Modernism did not only produce the likes of Eliot and Pound and other canonical writers but also gave us the voices of Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer and others who formed part of a dialogue that had too often been billed as a monologue.

As our students reached beyond these personal, disciplinary, and national borders, they confronted versions of his/stories that radically differed from their own. Thus in my multicultural literature courses, I found it useful to ask students at the outset to explore the narratives that structured their own lives. In this way, they considered their own perspectives as factors not only in their analysis of the text itself but also in interpreting their own reactions to it. In Fear of Falling: the Inner Life of the Middle Class, Barbara Ehrenreich points out that the "ideas and assumptions [of the middle class] are everywhere, and not the least in our own minds. Even those who come from very different social settings often find it hard to distinguish middle-class views from what we think we ought to think" (5). What we "ought" to think, according to Ehrenreich, is that "self-discipline, a strong superego, an ability to plan ahead to meet self-imposed goals" guarantee success. This story of autonomous, rational, efficient individuals achieving their goals is complemented by its opposite, the story of "Fatalism, helplessness, dependence and inferiority" which Ehrenreich claims frames middle-class assumptions about their others, and which informs its counter-narrative--the so-called "culture of poverty" (49).

My students invariably responded favorably to works by authors who affirm the virtues of self-reliance or provide tidy resolutions to complex problems. For instance, even after serious class discussions about the impact of social attitudes on our self-image, one of my students was frustrated by Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, because the main character, Pecola, a black child who is abused by her father and by the society that rejects her, does not act to remedy her situation. Instead of "playing the victim," the student wrote, Morrison should have learned something from Zora Neale Hurston, whose Janie, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, was an independent black woman who succeeds in the end. The student went on to conclude, "Pecola and Janie prove that society's racial attitudes, justified or not, are not the cause for outcomes like Pecola--the individual is." In this case, Morrison's story struck at the core of a definitive middle-class narrative in which hard work and self-reliance overcome all obstacles. Pecola's "failure" thus signaled a failure of individual will, not a systemic or societal flaw.

I was similarly surprised by students who blatantly expressed the wish that "they" (women, Native Americans, blacks, poor people) would simply "get over it." Discussions that attempted to demythologize aspects of the "American dream" story in literature exasperated students who wanted a college degree precisely because they wanted to earn more money and thus achieve that dream. Similarly, women writers who critiqued sexism were accused of "whining," ethnic writers who exposed prejudice should simply "go back where they came from," and third-world writers who took jabs at imperialism envied our wealth and might. For example, I assigned Dogeaters, a novel about Manila during the Marcos years, written by Jessica Hagedorn, a Filipine-American. The novel has several narrators, but the one who most aroused students' attention (and moral judgments) was Joey, a bisexual male prostitute.

Everything about Joey makes him an outcast: he is a drug-addict raised on the streets by his pimp; he sells his body to Western tourists, male and female; he is the son of a black American GI stationed in the Philippines and a Filipina prostitute; he uses both sides of his identity to earn a buck; and he has no loyalties to family, nation, or gender. Joey's character begs analysis, not only in the context of Filipino society--but also in the context of US-Philippine political and economic power relations. To equip students to engage in an informed discussion, I offered relevant background. Most students did not know that there were ever American military bases in the Philippines nor that our presence had generated intense political debates among Filipinos who did not want us there, nor that our presence had produced thousands of Amer-Asian street children--many who grew up much like Joey. When I shared estimates on the status of these children in the Philippines today, a young woman remarked that she had spent six years in the Army, which was paying for her education, and she was "sick and tired" of people "bashing" the U.S. military. A Vietnam veteran in the class quipped that Filipino mercenaries in Vietnam fought on our side "just for the money." That led another to target immigrants who cost "us" a fortune and increase the crime rate. Somehow, Joey had collided with one student's self-image, another's national interests, and another's personal safety.

So how do we teach across this wall of stories that students tell themselves "in order to live"? How do we foster compassion for those protagonists whose stories contradict our own comforting fictions? Consider what psychology teaches us about compassion, particularly about what factors must exist before we can sympathize with another's plight. First, we must believe that the individual is truly suffering--that is, that their suffering is not a sham or an exaggeration. Second, we must believe that their suffering is disproportionate, that is, they are suffering more than they deserve. And finally, we must believe that they didn't bring the suffering on themselves, that they are not to blame. This last one explains the "blame the victim" response current in today's debates about topics ranging from so called "welfare mothers" to "date rape." Introducing these elements into my teaching helps students locate critical junctures where their prejudices or fears turn to empathy. Such an approach provides tools for interrogating students' own value judgments when confronted with alternative discourses on class, ethnicity, and race; it challenges them to examine the basis of their antipathy to protagonists who register other versions, who subvert, for example, the familiar plot in which individual enterprise is the sole measure of success or failure.

One course I developed for the FGCU English program that explores the connection between personal histories and middle-class values is entitled, "The Immigrant Experience in US Literature." In a trial run of this course, students read novels by and about immigrants, while examining the social attitudes accompanying mass migrations into our borders. I see this as a particularly important topic, since prevailing myths about immigrants underscore national and local political rhetoric and shape immigration policy. America as "melting pot" is the conceptual metaphor that shapes our self-image and defines the national "self" against its internal Others--unassimilated ethnics. A familiar version of this assimilation tale tells us that past immigrants were willing to work hard and speak English, whereas today's immigrants are lazy, prone to criminal behavior, or refuse to adapt to "our" language and way of life. Thus my introductory lectures traced the attitudes and policies accompanying the influx of past immigrant groups.

In the course, we examined specific laws (such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or the 1924 National Origins Act) and their impact on targeted groups. Armed with historical awareness, students recognized patterns in economic, social, and political responses. In addition to reading selected novels, which helped to "personalize" the immigrant experience, students researched their own ancestry and shared their findings with the class. In doing so, they further complicated the story. They were surprised to discover anti-immigrant texts written a hundred years ago that sounded as if they were written today. In those texts, however, their ancestors were the "freeloaders," the ones clinging to their traditions and languages, rejecting middle-class values with their indolent or criminal ways.

We also addressed cultural differences among the early immigrants. Students of Irish descent, who today form an integral part of the American middle-class, were shocked to discover an 1849 article in the Massachusetts Teacher proclaiming the Irish an educator's "chief difficulty" when teaching American values in the classroom. "For the most part the simple virtues of industry and temperance are unknown to [the Irish]," the writer remarks, concluding that Irish children "must be taught as our children our taught" for "if left to the parents' direction the young will be brought up with their idle, dissolute, vagrant habits." (Swan) Remember the political rhetoric and talk-radio ranting that accompanied the immigrant welfare debates of the 1990s? It is no wonder that many of our students feel little compassion for the so-called "new immigration" from non-European nations. Their hardships or impoverishment merits little compassion when interpreted according to the more familiar success story they associate with their own ancestors. Imagine the ways that my students revised their story after learning that in 1990 9% of all welfare recipients were immigrants, compared to over 50% in 1909 (Rose). In 1911, two-thirds of those receiving public assistance in Chicago, for example, were foreign born (Rose). Our cultural memories often obscure the fact that more than one-third of those in public housing and insane asylums at the turn of the century were foreign-born. In 1906, Thomas Darlington, president of the New York Board of Health, complained that nearly half the spending at the city hospital went to treat the immigrant poor. Today, only about 6.5% of all Medicaid recipients (including hospital and office patients) are immigrants (Rose). Yet, popular myths sustain the belief that today's immigrants are lazier, less motivated, more likely to commit crimes than they were "in the good old days." Students emerged from this course with a more complex version of the story; characters that did not successfully overcome prejudice or poverty seemed less alien, less blameworthy in their misfortunes.

Interestingly, the most resistance came from a retiree auditing the class, himself the son of immigrants. We read Russell Banks' Continental Drift, which traces the parallel lives of a white male protagonist leaving his northern home for a new life in Florida, and a Haitian woman, Vanise, forced to flee her country onboard a smuggler's ship bound for America. Commenting on the factors contributing to Vanise's hardships, this student recast her as the antagonist in his own fiction. According to his reading, Vanise failed because she clung to her primitive superstitions--in this case, voodoo--which kept her from making more rational choices. Similarly, he saw Candido, the Mexican immigrant struggling to survive in Coraghessan Boyle's Tortilla Curtain, as unsuccessful because he broke the law by entering the country illegally. This student felt no compassion for these ill-fated characters, as they were accountable for their own failures. Stories like Vanise's or Candido's complicate middle-class affirmation tales in which sound choices and diligent efforts are rewarded. His parents, he said, overcame barriers instead of complaining about them; they "made it." To accept the possibility of unhappy endings is perhaps un-American: the stories we tell ourselves to live demand our complicity, our "willing suspension of disbelief."

In founding a new university, inaugural faculty at FGCU learned that it takes more than modern buildings and high-tech classrooms to construct a learning community. Steeped in middle-class aspirations, our students aimed to pursue skills they deemed necessary to compete and succeed financially. Most were programmed to seek tangible rewards and quantifiable, "useful" knowledge. Many regarded multicultural courses as novelty items on the academic menu to be consumed in required doses and only insofar as "they" served to reaffirm the desirability of "our" way of life. But a multicultural curriculum affects all aspects of social and intellectual activity. Leigh Binford and Wendy Hardin argue that in teaching a course on Third World Culture and Literature, they introduced "a new dynamic into the university setting, one which went against the expectations of students and the academic milieu which determined those expectations" (145).

The pedagogical aim of a multicultural curriculum is to create the conditions in which students become, in Henry Giroux's words, "border crossers." They learn to make room for complexity and variance, to explore the ideological boundaries that set the terms of engagement and delimit our capacity for compassion. As Sara Suleri claims in "Multiculturalism and its Discontents," the recognition of cultural differences inherent in a such a project "turns its attention away from the rigid boundaries of state and nation to see how many bodies have been consigned to a no-man's land, it counts those human shapes, it seeks to learn their stories, and finally--even in faulty accents--it learns to say their names" (16-17).

Works Cited

Binford, Leigh and Wendy Hardin. "How First World Students Read Third World Literature." Translating Latin America: Culture as Text. Eds.

William Luis and Julio Rodriguez-Luis. New York: U of New York at Binghamton, 1991.

Dennis, Judd and Daniel Hellinger. The Democratic Facade. Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole Publishers, 1991.

Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Flying: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Pantheon, 1989.

Giroux, Henry A. "Post-Colonial Ruptures and Democratic Possibilities: Multiculturalism and Anti-Racist Pedagogy." Cultural Critique 21.2 (Spring 1992): 5-39.

Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1992.

Maier, Charles S. The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1988.

Rinella, Heidi Knapp. "Race Study Jolts Lee into Action." News-Press 19 Jan. 1998: 1A.

Rose, Frederick. "Muddled Masses: The Growing Backlash Against Immigration Includes Many Myths." Wall Street Journal 26 April 1995: A1.

Suleri, Sara. "Multiculturalism and its Discontents." Profession 93 MLA (1993).

Swan, Wm. D. "Immigration." The Massachusetts Teacher IV.10 (October 1851): n.pag. <www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/pds/triumpnationalism/hickoryhs/massteacher.pdf>

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