Karina
F. Attar and Lynn Shutters, eds. Teaching
Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014.
Reviewed
by Patricia Taylor (patricia.taylor@lmc.gatech.edu)
Editors
Karina F. Attar and Lynn Shutters have created an excellent collection on teaching
cross-cultural encounters in courses focused on medieval and early modern
culture. As the editors note in the introduction, the humanities are under
suspicion from some critics for their relevancy to modern society at precisely
the same time that businesses and politicians proclaim the importance of having
workers that have cross-cultural and global acumen. Attar and Shutter present a convincing
case—or, more accurately, a series of convincing cases—that teaching the cross-cultural
and global natures of the medieval and early modern world provide ample
training ground for students to practice the specific forms of critical
thinking, self-awareness, and flexibility that are required to move across and
between cultures in the modern world. Attar, Shutters, and their contributors thus
speak to the institutional relevance of teaching medieval and early modern
cultures, as well as the humanities more broadly.
The
book offers twelve essays by scholars and faculty in a wide range of disciplines,
including art history, theater, Italian, French, English, and Latin and Iberian
Studies. Each essay articulates a theoretical and pedagogical basis for
addressing the stakes and difficulties of teaching cross-cultural encounters in
a particular discipline, and then proceeds from the underlying theory to
examples of syllabi, pedagogical approaches, class discussions, and specific
assignments. The courses described are both undergraduate and graduate, and from
a wide range of institutions with a variety of student demographics.
The
central conceit of the book is that cross-cultural encounters are not simply
synchronic, but also diachronic, and that historical distance can be a feature,
not a bug, when teaching cross-cultural encounters. The book is broken into
three major sections: the first six essays describe how the authors teach examples
of synchronic cultural encounters, while the next five describe how faculty
link synchronic encounters to diachronic ones. The final two essays focus primarily
on diachronic encounters. While breaking the essays into these groups is
appealing on the surface, when reading the volume, it became increasingly clear
that it was not nearly as necessary or accurate as it appears: every essay in
the opening section offers reflections on the diachronic cross-cultural
encounters between students and texts, and often other diachronic encounters as
well. Elizabeth Pentland’s essay, “Teaching English Travel Writing from 1500 to
the Present” describes a course that explicitly sets up comparisons between
modern and early modern travel literature, and Seth Kimmel explains in
“Andalusian Iberias: from Spanish to Iberian Literature” how his course takes
advantage of the fact that “especially since September 11, 2001, students come
to classes on the history and representation of pre-modern Christians, Muslims,
and Jews aware that contemporary politics of religion shape interpretations of
the past” (22).
While
every essay offers something of import to teachers in particular disciplines,
what is perhaps most encouraging about the book as a whole is the way it
reminds us that both our students’ and our own discomfort can be productive in
the classroom. The theme of comfort and discomfort appears over and over in the
collection. Most obvious and useful are the numerous essays that offer
different ways to help address students’ discomforts when encountering texts
from different cultures. Julie Scheck’s essay, “Stranger than Fiction: Early
Modern Travel Narratives and the Antiracist Classroom,” describes how the
distancing effect of teaching early modern literature is an important first
step in helping students become comfortable and more productive when discussing
race, but she also rightly insists that the historical distance of early modern
texts can accidentally perpetuate racism if faculty do not resist the potential
“minimizing” effect by connecting early modern texts to contemporary parallels
(97). Other essays, such as Ambereen Dadabhoy’s “The Moor of America,” productively
follow this line of thought by describing how faculty can avoid such
minimizing. Dadabhoy’s essay describes how she paired Othello with a discussion of the discourse surrounding President
Barak Obama.
The
collection repeatedly reminds faculty that their own discomfort can be equally
as important as student discomfort, and that teaching to our own discomforts
can increase student learning. For example, in “A Journey through the Silk Road
in a Cosmopolitan Classroom,” Kyunghee Pyun writes that “I was always more
comfortable staying away from current political issues,” but that the course’s
content pushed class discussion into productive, useful, and even “sensitive”
explorations of “humanitarian causes and the difficulty of maintaining a
delicate balance of power in the post-9/11 era” (66). Other essays highlight
how an instructor’s own discomfort stepping outside a traditional area of
expertise can actually produce the opportunity for students to bring their own
expertise—as immigrants, as speakers of other languages, as coming from a range
of ethnic and religious backgrounds—to create a more cross-cultural classroom.
As our classrooms become sites of increasing diversity, teaching even where we
lack authority and expertise can create the conditions for a truly
student-centered cross-cultural experience.
The
diversity of disciplines and approaches represented in the collection also
proves a great boon for the reader. For example, as an English literature
specialist, I found the approaches to teaching cross-cultural encounters
through the materiality of different disciplines particularly useful in two
essays: Pyun’s essay which discusses cross-cultural encounters through art
history, and Jenna Soleo-Shanks’s “Resurrecting Callimachus: Pop Music, Puppets, and the Necessity of Performance
in Teaching Medieval Drama,” which describes a performance-based pedagogy for
teaching medieval Italian drama. The editors state in the introduction that
they hope to “encourage interdisciplinary conversation, itself a vital, if
sometimes lacking, form of cross-cultural encounter within academia” (9). I
believe they have succeeded on this point, and I hope others will take up their
call as well. Teaching Medieval and Early
Modern Cross Cultural Encounters offers much that can encourage both
faculty and students to understand their classrooms as sites of cross-cultural
encounters with the medieval and early modern past. It is a much-needed
resource, though as the editors themselves point out, it only scratches the
surface of what is possible and needed.
Patricia
Taylor
Georgia Institute of Technology
