“The Danger of a Single Story”

In July, I attended the Asia Society’s Partnership for Global Learning Conference: “Creating Success in a Global Era: A World-Class Education for Every Student.” The following is a description of one of the sessions that I attended, “Beyond the Canon: Reading the World in Schools.” JB

The message of this session was that the selection of literature for English classroom use is a moral responsibility and that in the US the standard/traditional secondary school reading list
needs to be expanded and updated both to better represent the diverse backgrounds of American students and to expose these students to a wider range of global perspectives. The widespread high school use of The Scarlet Letter, Romeo & Juliet, and Huckleberry Finn were offered as examples. Perhaps the highlight of the session was the viewing of a 2009 “Ted Talk” given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (the Igbo Nigerian author of Purple Hibiscus, which we read in NWS 8th grade, Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel set during the Biafran War, and That Thing Around Your Neck, a short story collection – all available in the NWS Library). The title of Adichie’s eloquent remarks is “The Danger of a Single Story” (available at http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html). She describes growing up with a limited sense of the variety and possibilities around her (such as an absence of literary role models to whom she could relate) and also confronting stereotypes of her as an African (à la Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”) when she moved abroad. Some of the issues she raises echo Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place, such as the power embedded in who determines which stories get told and what stories they tell.
In thinking about what books we read in our classrooms, the discussion in this session encouraged attendees to challenge the canon of books that “need” to be read; this reading list is, as I see it, a self-referential tradition that, tainted by the biases and power of the dominant group that oversees its selection, becomes both self-justifying and self-perpetuating. It also raised the question of how many stories and perspectives it takes to offer a “complete” and accurate picture. To me, the challenge is achieving breadth of representation as well as depth, all within such constraints as very limited time. The (incomplete) answer offered to this challenge was to teach an attitude or lens rather than a particular list of titles. Present students with a diverse and representative range of texts and guide them in receiving these texts through an open and flexible prism, with as few preconceived notions as possible. We were advised to choose sets of books that, regardless of setting, dealt with universal human themes, such as “the power of the family,” or topics, e.g. food, that would thus be widely relevant and accessible. Another suggestion was to choose transpositions of Shakespeare.

Resources for finding international texts were shared via weblist, a cool web tool: see http://weblist.me/Beyond-the-canon.