A feminist poststructuralist auto/biographical interrogation of 'Things Fall Apart': Challenging dominant narratives of African experience.

摘要

In this auto/biographical study, I draw on feminist poststructuralist theories to argue that people's lives are mediated by multiple, constantly changing discourses that are shaped by material and embodied constructions of society, culture, and history. I interrogate the canonization of literature, particularly the canonization of Things Fall Apart---that produces static representations of African Experience. I argue that positioning texts as fully representative silences people's everyday experiences in multiple and continually changing locations.;I, therefore, trouble those literary and educational versions of curricular content framed by Enlightenment humanist theories that perpetuate a stereotyped, essentialized, other, simultaneously exploring the interpretative processes through which I and others construct subjectivities in the teaching and writing about life experiences. Using feminist poststructuralist theories to emphasize how my analyses of my own autobiographical narratives are not transparent, my study attends to ways in which dominant discourses in US English Education maintain power relations and representations of "experience" to impose certain interpretations as social truths---reality, or the norm.;I employ narratives in which I explore how teachers and students at an affluent school district construct Things Fall Apart through dominant discourses in the field of US English Education; discussions with my father on how we situate ourselves and are situated in our narratives, as well as my work with pre-service and in-service English teachers in a class on diversity issues that I have taught.;Laurel Richardson's (2000) methodological framework of "writing as inquiry" provides concomitant processes of analysis and interpretation as a way of meaning production. Making use of a feminist poststructuralist interpretative framework, I utilize writing as a method of inquiry to interrogate how I am discursively constructed as well as construct my own meanings in multiple, constantly changing subject positions that are, in themselves, open to multiple, always changing interpretative frameworks. This study produces no single, absolute meaning, therefore, but inquires into the process of continually shifting, inconsistent, often contradictory, selves (researcher, research participants and reader) that shape and, in turn, shape educational/academic research.