The need to develop an intercultural perspective amongst students of language and literature has been stressed in many recent publications. Inspired by Homi Bhabha’s notion of a “third space” for language teachers and their students, in which the ideological bases of division and difference could be scrutinised, the American academic Claire Kramsch suggests that students should be treated as “potentially heteroglossic narrators,” whose texts, both written and spoken, “have to be considered ... not only as expressing the thoughts of their authors, but as situated utterances contributing to the construction, perpetuation and subversion of particular cultural contexts.” By establishing a process of “reinscription and relocation emerging out of cultural difference,” teachers may become “agents of social change” (“The Cultural Component of Language Teaching” 6-7). In a document published by the Council of Europe, for the benefit of teachers and youth workers in the European Union, Michael Byram and Geneviève Zarate emphasise that language and/or literature teaching should take place “within the framework of multidisciplinary work, which might include, in addition to the foreign language, disciplines such as history, geography, social sciences, etc.” This could serve to promote “relationships between two cultural communities, describing one to help understand the other” (18-19).

What Obeidat’s article appears to demonstrate is the difficulty of implementing these proposals in a non-American or European academic context. He might be thought of as an agent of social change, as he seeks to “deal constructively with their [his students’] uneasiness and perplexity,” and thereby help them “to redefine the proper response to past and present confusions, not as cultural ‘bias’ but as a renewed responsibility to know about the conflicts of the past and the tolerance of the present” (42). Yet this is to be achieved not by treating students as “potentially heteroglossic narrators,” but rather to “reduce (if not remove) the ... need to work through their own assumptions and individual beliefs” and “transform their expectations into acceptance of American literature as a field of human knowledge” (42).

In contrast to Byram and Zarate, who advise teachers within the European Union to adopt a multi-disciplinary perspective, Obeidat tells his students about the uniqueness of literature; that it will require them to “work harder than they expect” on texts which “make complex demands on the reader.” He believes that cultural understanding can be achieved first by “making a serious commitment to dealing with literature (whether American or not) on its own merits,” and subsequently moving outwards to consider “literary traditions and other aspects of culture” (43).

Clearly there are some points here which could be challenged by the American or European reader: how (and in what way) does literature “make complex demands on the reader”; and to what extent can teachers and students treat literature “on its own merits,” without considering both the context for the text—how it is received by American and Arab readers—and how the text itself seeks to include the reader within its effect, as subject for a position? Yet there are certain aspects of the American and European-orientated theories of interculturality which may seem equally questionable from an Arab perspective. It seems unlikely that the concept of multi-disciplinarity would find much favour with English departments in “the Arab world,” which according to Obeidat are already preoccupied with questions such as whether to focus on teaching language or literature, whether Western literature should be studied at all, and if so, whether it has an adverse effect on the students (39).

In comparing Obeidat’s views with those expressed by European or American educationalists, I am not seeking to be critical; rather I am trying to suggest the importance of difference in any intercultural exchange. Obeidat’s students are taught to appreciate literature on its own merits; this is certainly not the most important objective of teachers working in American or British departments of literature. Kramsch, Byram and Zarate have all been involved in a large-scale project, funded by the European agency LINGUA, to study ways in which teachers can be sensitised to foreign cultural phenomena before and during their sojourns abroad (Kramsch, “The Cultural Component of Language Teaching” 7). In stark contrast, Obeidat reveals that the practice of teaching a foreign culture through literature has been queried by certain Arab scholars, who argue “that when we introduce any Western literature ... into English programs, what we are doing is introducing a culturally ‘superior,’ if somewhat threatening subject that represents a world more powerful, more dominating, and more compelling than our own culture” (39).

Such comparisons should prompt us to ask what the significant and problematic features of difference are, and what part it plays in the development of an intercultural perspective. To answer this, I think we should look more carefully into what difference actually means. Obeidat’s article suggests that it can be defined as the identification of certain specificities of a culture—economic, historical, political, or social—which determine the organisation of courses in cultural, literary or area studies (e.g. British or American Studies). His approach is characteristic of many teachers of cultural studies in America or Europe (latterly Australia and Asia), who have paid particular attention to such specificities in minority cultures, by preserving and enhancing them, and thereby “empowering” them by institutionalising their study in the university. Yet this can lead to the elimination of difference, with such cultures being celebrated for their contribution, rather than their resistance, to the dominant hegemony. This technique of appropriation is especially evident in those programmes in American or British Studies, studied in a non-American or British context, which incorporate courses in “Multiculturalism,” alongside courses in history, government and politics. As J. Hillis Miller suggests, it is important both “to preserve and productively transform cultural differences” (48).

Yet how is this process of transformation to be achieved? By celebrating difference based on specificities, teachers could run the risk of establishing a new form of essentialism. In their efforts to speak for those without power, they might ignore the existence of cultural diversity in the dominant or minority cultures. David Dabydeen rejects “Western critical theory” as “being inappropriate to an understanding of West Indian literature,” and instead suggests that “the Amer-indian and the East Indian [perspectives], with their particular cultural and philosophical dimensions ... [should be] placed at the centre of our considerations” (138, 149). It is not a question of placing one perspective at the centre, and another on the periphery; but rather recognising the claims of all perspectives. Teachers should look for new forms of expression, which are not based on pre-existing polarities such as “black”/“white,” “East”/“West,” “self”/“other,” “us”/“them.” Such formulations make it easier for those within the dominant culture to appropriate cultural studies in the name of liberal pluralism, a pluralism that leaves existing power structures intact. A conception of group solidarity that acknowledges cultural specificities, yet realises that such specificities are always contingent, always changing, the result of new socio-cultural formations, might be a way to resist this kind of appropriation.

This strategy assumes particular importance when dealing with students learning a foreign culture. Intercultural communication cannot be solely defined as the identification and understanding of cultural differences based on specificities (one of the main aims of a mainstream American or British Studies programme); teachers and students should endeavour to make sense of such differences by exploring them both in terms of the foreign culture and their own cultures.

If we look once again at my observations on Obeidat, Byram, Zarate and Kramsch in the light of this aim, it becomes clear that I have invoked one of those polarities (“Arab”/“European”) which may inhibit negotiation between cultures. All of them are proposing different strategies to work towards the same goal: the creation of new forms of group solidarity that may resist, and ultimately change established perceptions of a foreign culture. By focusing on American literature as a complex subject, that requires considerable intellectual effort, Obeidat hopes to overcome his students’ misgivings, and make them more willing to treat the texts on their own merits. This is almost precisely what Byram and Zarate recommend for students and teachers, who, having encountered “otherness”—in the form of the foreign culture—should try to “understand better their own feelings” when confronted with it (7).

So far we have looked at the meaning of the term “difference,” as expressed through the identification of specificities in the foreign culture; in pedagogical terms, this may be expressed as what kind of elements—social, economic, linguistic—to investigate when studying why one culture (a minority or a foreign culture) differs from our own. What must also be borne in mind, however, is that the starting-points for intercultural analysis depend on another set of specificities. These may be geographical (in which country, region, or city is the culture being studied?); educational (what kind of course is it, is it taught in English or in the native language, at school or university?); pedagogical (what kind of teaching methods are used?); and social (to what extent are the teachers’ and the students’ levels of cultural awareness influenced by their backgrounds?). In these terms, the suggestions put forward by Obeidat, Kramsch, Byram and Zarate are certainly very different. Obeidat works in “the Arab world,” with students majoring in English (including American literature), many of whom have had little or no previous academic exposure to American culture or literature (37). Kramsch’s work has been mostly confined to Europe, America and Australia (Curriculum Vitae 4-11); in a recent article, Byram points out that his notions of “socio-cultural competence ... [were] developed with reference to the Western European context where the mobility of citizens is a policy aim and already a reality” (57).

It is evident that an intercultural perspective depends on being able to negotiate and yet acknowledge the importance of these differences. Negotiating difference involves the investigation, comparison and evaluation of various specificities both within the foreign culture, and the teacher’s and student’s cultural contexts. It is something which is characteristic of all the views I have surveyed in this paper. Yet this should not be perceived as a means to bridge or eliminate difference; rather, students and teachers need to establish what Homi Bhabha terms “a border post”—a site of previously unchartered territory from which to explore the sometimes irreconcilable differences between people’s values and attitudes (459).

To an extent, the models of intercultural learning that I have proposed so far have been based on the assumption that specificity and difference complement one another. Yet there are occasions where the two concepts could provoke conflict—especially when considered in relation to personal and collective identities. Obediat observes that

To some students [in his classes] studying American literature is no different from studying their own native literature; that is, it is basically a formalistic activity based on purely academic concerns. However, to the majority of the students, it not only means considering the values or concerns of American literature and the effects of these upon readers, but also implies having to go further and being confronted with the various moral, social, religious, national, political, historical, and even geographical contexts of American literature.  Thus the potential for tension is always there. Not unexpectedly, therefore, this tension becomes a troubling experience for my students as well as for myself, constituting an unwanted element of the class.  (37)

From a pedagogical point of view, what Obediat’s experience also reveals is the contribution of methodology towards establishing an intercultural perspective. Miller describes some of the aims of cultural studies as follows: the deconstruction of “the dominant culture”; “the celebration, preservation, transformation and empowerment of subordinated cultures”; and the analysis of how “power and knowledge, the performative and cognitive aspects of such work, are symmetrical and harmonious” (43-53). The practitioner should “appropriate the procedures of critical theory to disempower that [dominant] culture by showing its injustice and by showing the hidden ways in which a given work ... was in spite of itself in the service of state power and state ideology” (Miller 47-8), and “empower and transform local individual cultures ... [by] inventing new forms of consolidation and solidarity” (Miller 51). What he does not discuss is how these objectives should be put into practice. One solution might be to teach cultural studies in a manner similar to that I experienced as a postgraduate: students were expected to work a great deal on their own, bringing their ideas to a weekly or fortnightly two-hour seminar, and writing them up in term papers. In the Turkish context, however, students are accustomed to taking copious notes in seminars, and reproducing them in essays or end-of-semester examinations. This may be explained by the fact that academic status in most university departments is chiefly on those with a comprehensive knowledge of cultural theories, as formulated in the American or European context. Through a process of collaboration with the students, I have tried to create a method of study which involves all of us undertaking tasks—often ethnographically based—which encourage closer scrutiny of our own cultures in the light of such knowledge, and thereby create an effective platform for the renegotiation of cultural differences. My approach is oppositional in two ways: we are all involved in gathering and subsequently evaluating the material (which is not readily available in university libraries); while the material itself—questionnaires, taped interviews, etc.—is certainly not “academic,” as understood in the Turkish university context. This may suggest two things; it justifies Miller’s claim that (inter)cultural studies is about the deconstruction of “the dominant culture” and “the celebration, preservation, transformation and empowerment of subordinated cultures”; and—because it was something established collaboratively—it promoted reflection on the limits which the Turkish students’ and their British teacher’s academic cultures, classrooms and institutions had imposed on them (see Raw 133-147). I make no claim for the advantages of this approach over any other (several colleagues—whether Turkish, American or British—are experimenting with different techniques in the classroom); but it nonetheless draws attention to the importance of taking both content (what is taught) and form (how it is taught) into account, when considering how students—and in this case, the teacher—can make sense of other cultures.

In commenting upon Obeidat’s article, I realise that I have moved away somewhat from his central concern about how to teach American Literature in a non-American context, into more general issues of interculturality, specificity and difference. I have cited others who have written about equally specific subjects—both Kramsch and Byram write about language and language teaching, rather than literature. I make no apologies for doing so: what I have tried to show in this paper is that despite the specificities of approach, all three writers share the common aim of trying to find ways of teaching “culture”—which may be defined in this sense as “an understanding that we are irreducibly unique and different, and that I could have been you, you could have been me, in different circumstances—in other words, that the stranger, as [Julia] Kristeva says, is in us” (Kramsch, “The Cultural Component of Language Teaching” 4). In an educational landscape dominated by demands to create multi-disciplinary programmes to attract the interest of students, particularly in universities, perhaps we should reflect that it is this kind of definition, based on the acquisition of critical cultural competence by students and teachers alike, which provides the justification for such programmes. As a Briton married to a Turk, resident in Ankara for nearly eight years, teaching “British and Comparative Cultural Studies” to under- and postgraduate students, my conception of “native” and “foreign” cultures has become extremely confused; it is only by treating “culture” in this way that I can make sense of what I teach to my students, and what they can teach me. Perhaps this is why I found Obediat’s article so illuminating.
 
 

Bhabha, Homi K. “Editor’s Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations.” Critical Inquiry  23:3 (Spring 1997) : 431-60.

Byram, Michael. “Cultural Studies and Foreign Language Teaching.” Studying British Cultures. Ed. Susan Bassnett. London: Routledge, 1997: 53-65.

Byram, Michael and Geneviève Zarate. Young People Facing Difference: Some Proposals for Teachers. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 1995.

Dabydeen, David. “Teaching West Indian Literature in Britain.” Studying British Cultures. Ed. Susan Bassnett. London: Routledge, 1997: 135-52.

Kramsch, Claire. “Curriculum Vitae” (November 1996). Privately printed.

------.“The Cultural Component of Language Teaching.” British Studies Now 8 (January 1997): 4-7.

Miller, J. Hillis. Illustration. London: Reaktion Books, 1991.

Obeidat, Marwan. “The Cultural Context of American Literature: A Barrier or a Bridge to Understanding?” Journal of American Studies of Turkey  4 (Fall 1996) : 37-45.

Raw, Laurence. “Finding a (Culturalist) Language.” Journal of English Literature and British Culture 5 (1996) : 133-47.
 

* Dr. Lawrence Raw is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and English Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University and the British Council, Ankara.
 

[JAST 5 Contents]   [JAST Homepage]