Full Description
Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live.
Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine.
Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar
Contents
Introduction
May Hawas and Bruce Robbins | 1
Melville's Democratic Pedagogy: Moby-Dick Takes On Hobbes's Leviathan
Bonnie Honig | 20
Liberal Education and the Politics of Discussion
Benjamin Mangrum | 37
Teaching While Arab
Mona Kareem | 58
Whose Politics? Teaching Palestinian Literature
Nora E. H. Parr | 72
"Don't Speak or Laugh! Greece Is in Danger!":
Censoring Dissident Discourse on So-Called National Issues in Greece
Dimitris Christopoulos and Dimitri Dimoulis | 89
The Politics of Mentorship
May Hawas | 106
Teaching Literature Politically: Some Examples
Bruce Robbins | 125
Baking and Breaking Bread, or Daniel Defoe and the Catastrophic Imagination
Rishi Goyal | 140
Foundations for Nauru Prison Theory:
Australian Border Violence, Art, and Knowledge Production
Elahe Zivardar and Omid Tofighian | 151
Politics Was in the Very Air We Breathed
Conversations with Khaled Fahmy and Ahdaf Soueif | 170
Contributors | 191
Index | 195
