TOWARD NEW MODELS FOR
CROSS-CULTURAL READING AND INTERPRETATION

 

I. AN ARENA OF LEARNING AND CHANGE
(Summary of Dasenbrock, Reed Way. "Teaching Multicultural Literature."
Understanding Others. Ed. Joseph Trimmer and Tilly Warnock.
Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1992. 35-46.)

A. Cross-Cultural reading and interpretation should be approached as an arena of learning, for teachers as well as students.

1. Discard the assumption that the only "proper" interpreter is the already informed expert interpreter: if we only attempt to learn and teach what we already "know" (e.g literatures of our own cultures), we discourage cross-cultural "outside" reading and learning, and confine ourselves to the traditional "canon" of Western literature

2. Recent literary theories have made "room" for the reader in the interpretive act, but when reading cross-cultural texts, Hermeneutics, Deconstruction, and Reader response critics have given the reader too much room. Such theorists suggest we can only understand texts on our own terms, can only understand what is like us, and we remake literary texts in our own image (e.g., "universalize"). Such theorists encourage us to read to take possession of the text and fail to address the classroom and cross-cultural situation.

3. A key goal is to stimulate the reader’s curiosity about other cultures, not to possess or control the text from the position of the expert. Instead, students and teachers should cross cultures as learners, as needing and wanting to learn about other cultures, their literatures and verbal arts; initially, we choose to become more knowledgeable; gradually, we become more informed and overcome the sense of remoteness and strangeness of others’ difference across time and culture.

B. Cross-cultural reading and interpretation is an arena of change (Dasenbrock citing Davidson)

1. The site of reading and interpretation is a site of learning, adaptation, and change for cross-cultural readers as they engage with cultural difference, remoteness--it is "not an arena of certainty" where one can be proven "correct."

2. A starting point for developing new, more appropriate models of cross-cultural reading and interpretation might be this model (based on Davidson): The central movement in interpretation is from an assumption of similitude to an understanding of difference. The stages are:

a. The uninformed reader will begin with a "prior theory," "interpretive charity" that assumes the new person or text we encounter is like us (same worldview, behavior patterns, values, aesthetic principles, etc.), but also with the receptive attitude of desiring to learn across cultures.

b. The reader encounters "interpretive anomalies," differences that make us suspect the new person or text is not like us in significant ways, and our "prior theory" of similitude is wrong, incomplete, and in need of adjustment.

c. We construct a sequence of "passing theories"--short term theories of interpretation--as we gather more and more information, adapting our inferences about the person or text being interpreted/read so that our interpretive theory better fits the new person/text we’re trying to interpret and understand.

d. The powerful cross-cultural text provokes readers to construct these "passing theories"; they are often designed to do: that is, they are not written for readers just like themselves/their authors, and the "best" writers do this kind of writing well.

e. Gradually, readers change their interpretive systems to accommodate the culturally different people/texts, as readers gain more experience with such cross-cultural encounters, so that readers can communicate interculturally across difference.

3. Understanding of cultural difference leads, not to an inability to interpret, but to an ability to communicate across difference, even if we don’t share the same beliefs, values, etc. What is essential is that we become better informed and more experienced in understanding what culturally different others mean by their words and they would understand ours to mean. We construct sequential short-term "passing theories" to interpret differences, and keep adjusting those passing theories again and again as we learn more and more.

4. In the process, the reader-interpreter changes, adapts, learns in the cross-cultural encounters with the anomalous, the different, so the encounters are experienced as productive, not frustrating. The cross-cultural experience is rich, even at its most confusing, because we develop and draw on translation/interpretive competencies, as we would in any sustained kind of interpersonal communication.

 
II. READING (AND TEACHING)
AS CROSS-CULTURAL TRANSLATION
(Summary of Dingwaney, Anuradha, and Carol Maier. "Translation as a Method for Cross Cultural Teaching."
In Understanding Others: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature.
Eds. Joseph Trimmer and Tilly Warnock. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1992. 47-62.)

A. What translators do (cf. Royster’s "Code of Conduct . . ." ):

1. Translators assume something in one language/culture can be communicated, "borne across," and recovered in another language/culture.

2. Translators interpret, mediate, intervene in the "prior"/original text to be translated; translators do not, cannot just repeat or copy the prior text.

3. At issue in judging the worth of translations is the "appropriateness," not the "accuracy," of the translator’s choices.

4. Translators owe "fidelity" to the "prior" text/author; the translator has not authority to disregard it or to substitute it for texts of the translator’s own. The author of the prior text, embedding or inserting her/himself into her/his culture, also "translates" that culture--its cultural, social, historical, political realities--with authority for initiating in particular ways for particular purposes that must be respected. The original text, then, constrains and resists "appropriation" by the translator-reader; that is, the translator cannot interpret the original text in terms only of the translator-reader’s own experience and culture.

5. Translators must also acknowledge that even the most "faithful" translations are refracted through the translators’ own experiences, cultures, worldviews, aethetic values, etc. "Informed" translation, then, is aware of its inevitable mediation, even as it tries to remain accountable to the original author’s purposes, what the author wants from readers, how the author envisions readers, the processes and modes of creative production with the author’s culture, the arrangement and materials of the prior text, etc.

6. Translators aim to create a "complex tension," or dialectical interplay, between two goals:

a. to make the "alien" original text familiar, accessible, immediate, readable to the intended cross-cultural readers; to allow the prior text to speak as directly as possible, with power, immediacy, urgency, to the cross-cultural reader, enabling "identification" (even if this is problematical)--enabling the reader to imagine her/himself in the author’s place--without "appropriating" the original author’s distinct cultural/personal identity; and . . .

b. to respect and render the difference of the original text/author, the cultural distance that does exist between the readers’/translators’ world and the prior text/author’s context--yet without making that difference and distance so inaccessible as to prompt cross-cultural readers to dismiss or abandon the rewards, as well as responsibilities, of crossing cultures.

B. "Revisioning" reading (learning and teaching) cross-cultural texts as "translation":

1. Readers acknowledge the conditions, mediations, goals, limitations and possibilities of translation as definitive of reading (learning, teaching) across cultures.

2. Such readers expect cross-cultural reading to be a sometimes disquieting (e.g. the anxieties of "cross cultural translation), but ultimately rewarding activity.

3. Such reading is approached as highly interactive, a dynamic of participating-distancing that makes readers more aware of the organizing principles at work in their own reading and interpretation, and of the claims the cross-cultural text makes upon readers even as it gives them access to another world.

4. Readers are challenged to re-position themselves between and within both worlds--their own and that of the text--and readers consciously choose to work within/between the difference.

5. This effort at "transculturation" (Dingwaney and Maier cite Perez Firmat) is a transition, passage, process of fermentation, turmoil, that leads to a cross-cultural synthesis of the two worlds.


III. CULTURE-CONTACT MODEL OF READER RESPONSE
(Summary of Schwab, Gabriele. "Reader-Response
and the Aesthetic Experience of Otherness."
Stanford Literature Review 3 (Spring 1986): 107-136.)

A. Text-Reader communication is approached as a cross-cultural activity--"a form of contact between the reader’s and the text’s different or historically remote cultural speech performances"-- the following assumptions are made:

1. The Text . . .

a. is "a virtual life form" in its own right, complex and dynamic, forming part of the "self-shaping process of a living cultural system" which the text expresses;

b. is an agent of "culture contact," working at the boundaries of the text’s culture and the [readers’] cultures that admit the text to their canons;

c. is "contact" with "otherness," when it is being read, and recognizing the text’s "otherness" or cultural difference is acknowledging that the text "constrains" or controls the reading and subjective interpretation to some extent;

d. has "subversive" power (to influence, affect, change the reader), and this power lies in the text’s "otherness" or cultural difference; reading, or "contact," with the text’s otherness can engage the reader in the process of dissolving, reshaping, widening, or transgressing the reader’s self-cultural boundaries.

e. is made of language, which is inherently "unstable" in meaning and structure; therefore, the text is "opened" to multiple readings, cross-cultural "misreadings," and interpretations.

2. The Reader . . .

a. has a culture and history of culture contacts that shape the reader’s "scope of dealing with, imposing, or acknowledging ‘otherness’ or difference"; such culture contacts include contact with communities with different cultures, contact with differences within the reader’s own culture(s), and the processes that mold and train the child to fit into the culture into which s/he was born.

b. has internalized patterns of reacting to cultural "otherness," patterns which shape the reader’s habits of reading and are influenced by the reader’s own cultural community.

c. varies/develops these internalized patterns and her/his cross-cultural "scope" according to:

1. stages of the reader’s life
2. reading competencies
3. forms and complexities of the texts read
4. cultural and historical development
5. remoteness of the cross-cultural contacts
6. norms of the cultural community(ties) to which reader belongs

3. Reading . . .

a. is a form of culture contact, through individual acts of reading (text-reader communication) and the processes whereby the reader is socialized into her/his own reading habits.

b. is like other forms of culture contact in that reading affects the boundaries of the reader’s self and culture(s), and can influence and change patterns of internalized reading and dealing with cultural difference--"at its best," reading can widen the reader’s abilities to "perceive and acknowledge otherness."

c. has a history and a development shaped by dealing with cultural difference, that parallels the historical development and "psychogenesis" of the self--though not necessarily a linear development of "teleological" change (i.e. purposeful change with a guiding design) toward an ultimate, final desired end (e.g, say, wise maturity and increasing sophistication). That is, early forms of "culture-contact" reading may either fuse with or compete against later forms of reading, and preserving early forms of reading (Schwab cites Bateson) can be desirable, keeping the "scope" of the reading "system" for dealing with cultural difference flexible and alive.

B. Early phases of development and change in a reader’s history of (culture contact) reading and relating to otherness:

1. Introjection (to take in, swallow up, merge with what the reader wants to assimilate): the text is "assimilated": taken in and subjectively recreated as part of the reader; in a sense the text, as a separate entity, is "destroyed," and the reader’s reception of the text is a creative transforming process, which produces a new "subjectivity" in the reader-text interaction. There are two forms of such assimilation:

a. Text is assimilated into the reader’s world. The text has the power to shape the boundaries of the reader’s self, or even to create a popular cultural "fashion of the self" (e.g. Don Quixote-like "madness by romantic identification "[Schwab cites Foucault]; or the history of fashion fades adopted from literature, art, and other media, such as the Michael Jackson cult). Sartre theorizes the "imaginary personality" forged by early childhood reading that can be formative of the reader’s entire personality and embed a pattern of reading unconsciously remaining throughout adult life.

b. Reader is assimilated into the text’s world. The "overwhelming power of the imaginary" breaks down spontaneously the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. (e.g. Reader temporarily fuses (identifies) with literary characters, a fusion that is "most intensely enjoyed"; theories of catharsis and "suspending disbelief" are also based on this type of assimilation). Psychoanalytic and psychological critical theorists explain this form of fusion and relating to otherness as stemming from a "latent desire for primordial undifferentiatedness and oneness between self and the world" so that "otherness" (difference, separation) disappears and is replaced by sameness (identity, union).

[Later in life, a “nostalgia” for the loss of introjection (assimilation of the reader into the text’s world) remains, even after/if the reader becomes more self-reflexive and critically sophisticated. Schwab calls literature a “protected area” for temporarily re-invoking the pleasures of this experience by breaking down the boundaries between the real and the imaginary--whereas in real everyday life, this kind of fusion/confusion would be “a threat to self.”]

2. Projection (to use the text to symbolize and replicate the reader; the reader’s identity is projected into and recreates itself in the text): projection, as distinguished from introjection, allows no possibility of change in the reader. (Adorno and Horkheimer theorize that gradually we learn to control or restrain projection, part of the basic process of learning to distinguish between our own emotions and those of others.) See also C.1 below.

3. Rejection (to spit out, keep from touching what we want to reject): as a form of reacting to otherness, rejection is the the opposite of introjection and "more ambiguous" than introjection/assimilation.

a. Early phase of rejection occurs within introjection/fusion (e.g., child-reader rejects evil characters within the imaginary world, but otherwises fuses with that imaginary world; there may be a latent fascination with the evil characters, however).

b. Later phase of rejection arises when otherness/difference is perceived as a threat and initiates the establishment of defense mechanisms against difference; certain forms of cultural difference and experience are rejected, often with definite political implications (e.g., an adult form would be the cultural politics of the Nazis based on a paranoid rejection of otherness). Thisrejection pattern of "reading" difference, a form of culture contact that rejects difference/otherness will rigidify one’s own boundaries to maintain internal/cultural coherence, and can lead to increased conflict and hostility in future culture contact destructive for all concerned.

[Defensive protection of self-boundaries isolates and fragments the self in a closed system of thought. The lack of what Adorno and Horkheimer call a “self-reflected projection” that ceases to reflect on otherness/difference, causes one to lose the “capacity for difference.” They theorize that loss of this capacity, coupled with paranoid projections of grandeur or persecution, leads to a consuming desire to destroy otherness/difference.]

4. Transitional (Schwab cites Winnecott: a child’s relationship to so-called "transitional objects" help differentiate between the self and the world, and provide a basis for establishing "self-boundaries"; transitional objects are experienced as neither completely separate nor completely identical with the self-in-formation, blurring the distinction between the "I" and the "not-I.") Transitional phase readers treat literary characters as "transitional objects," and the "otherness"/difference of the text is partly maintained and partly assimilated.

a. Two kinds of cultural experiences are involved in creating self-boundaries:

1. The otherness/difference of the outside world (a text, a different culture)

2. The otherness/difference within: the unconscious, a "personal core of self" where one’s most personal values and ideal reside, an "internalized other"

b. Interaction with "transitional objects" creates "intermediate"areas of experience, spaces for having the imaginary or illusionary experiences of reading, as well as creating, literature. These intermediate areas are sites of "mediation" between self and the world, and self and the unconscious; and here self-boundaries are continually reshaped by communication and interaction with the "otherness"/difference from without and, indirectly, from within.

[Though adults know the difference between the real and the symbolic, this transitional or intermediate space, envisioned as experience and created in the early transitional phases of culture contact reading, will remain later in life as a space for imaginary or illusionary experiences, including both the creating and reading of literary works and other cultural phenomena; and here in this space one engages in the experience of otherness/difference (from without and within) and reshapes self-boundaries in the process.]

C. Projection, Ethnocentrism, and Non-Destructive Culture Contact

1. Projection is the attribution of one’s own feelings, attitudes, and/or desires onto someone or something else (the other, the culturally different). According to Schwab, projection is the central model of perception in the anthropology model of culture contact (at least until recently). According to a standard introductory anthropology textbook, enculturation is the process whereby culture is passed from one generation to the next: as self-awareness develops, the child learns about otherness/difference perceived in terms that are specified by the culture in which s/he grows up. Culture is defined as a system to ensure the survival and continued well-being of the group, while the presence of diverse groups with different, and sometimes conflicting interests, raises the possibility that the cultural serves and fulfills the interests of some members of the group better than others. Anthropologist Pierre Maranda (cited in Schwab) explains that we account for "others" (otherness, difference), interpreting what we see and experience (and read), in terms of the ideologies that mold us. One form of projection produces "acceptance" or "the feeling of proper understanding" of difference/otherness, when we have "reduced" the other or "a piece of literature to congruency" with our culturally-determined "prejudices and stereotypes." Schwab notes that "a certain of amount of reduction of otherness as a form of ‘making sense’ by reducing complexity seems to be a basic and necessary operation in the reading process."

Example: The Tiv of West African have a highly refined oral tradition, and every story is supposed to have a true, determinant meaning. The elders of the tribe control interpretation in this culture. When anthropologist Laura Bohannon told the Tiv elders the story of Hamlet, the elders "projected" on Shakespeare’s text an interpretation shaped by Tiv cultural perceptions--"to reduce the otherness that would have made Hamlet incomprehensible in their context." Projection is a means of "coping with and appropriating otherness," neutralizing a form of otherness/difference that would have questioned the Tiv worldview--"a necessary boundary-preserving activity," especially for a people facing "the overwhelming impact of European culture." [Of course, Schwab’s interpretation of the Tiv’s "misreading" of Hamlet is also culturally determined.] The people of any culture have "internalized" cultural norms for reading and interpretation. However, according to Schwab, "during the civilizing process" (presumably in Western cultures?) and the formation of self, "mechanisms of projection" become more "refined" and most of us learn "to control and restrain projection," enabling us to develop "self-consciousness" and "responsibility for others." Otherwise, "lack of differentiation" between ourselves and others becomes "pathological."

2. Ethnocentrism is "the belief that one’s own culture is superior in all ways to every other culture" (Havilland, Anthropology). "Mapping Intercultural Developmental Models" (packet) defines "Ethnocentric States" as "assuming worldview of one’s own culture is central to all reality." The "Minimization of Difference" stage in these models suggests the ways ethnocentric projection can affect cross-cultural reading and dealing with difference/others--e.g., by tendencies to "universalize" or "homogenize" difference/otherness. Schwab states that all readings are necessarily ethnocentric at the early stages--a concept that "only makes sense after a certain amount of experience of difference and differentiation is acquired." She also acknowledges that there is no "easy way" to "discard" ethnocentric readings and interpretations, bound as we all are by our culturally-determined worldviews and ideologies. However, she places hope in cross-cultural reading of imaginative literature and in our retention of those "transitional" or "intermediate" areas of imaginary/illusionary experience created by our early interactions with "transitional objects" and the "transitional" phase experiences of our reading histories.

3. Non-Destructive culture contact is provided by reading literature, and Schwab views with dismay the "displace[ment]" of literature by popular culture and other media, as well as critical tendencies which tend to "objectify and depersonalize literature," in the twentieth century. The resulting emphasis on critical self-reflection as the primary means to intervene or correct (self-)destructive patterns of dealing with cultural difference is limited and inadequate because it fails to reach the "unconscious" site of the "personal core of self." Rather, she recommends a "double strategy," which reading imaginative literature can provide because of its self-transforming power to negotiate between the self and the others--within and without--in the transitional spaces of culture contact reading.

That the unconscious must also be reached in trying to combat ethnocentrism, destructive forms of projection in dealing with cultural difference is also illustrated by Franz Fanon’s critique of the unconscious and conscious mechanisms of colonialism and racism in The Wretched of the Earth. (What racism does to the unconscious and the imagination of the racist, demonstrated in the ways literature is created and read, is examined in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark.) Fanon analyzes the ways colonizer and colonized are affected when colonial systems devalue, prohibit, and destroy the culture of the colonized (the culturally different and oppressed other). "[T]he colonized can only survive by making the colonizer’s culture their own" and colonization is only complete when the colonized have become estranged from their native culture, "relegated to the political unconscious and . . . internalized as the ‘Other’" to be despised. Successful colonial resistance and decolonization requires a "cultural liberation" that reaches and transforms the "colonized unconscious" (or as Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o* phrases it, the mind must be "decolonized"). Peoples of majority/dominant cultures would not have been compelled to internalize such debilitating self-hatred, but the "otherness" embedded in the unconscious--in forms such as racism, sexism, classism, ethnocentrism, stereotypes and other prejudices--is also the urgent concern, for example, of multicultural educationists.

[*“A dialect is a language without an army behind it.” (Author unknown.) Fanon’s and Ngugi’s concept of the “colonized mind” of peoples once under Western colonialism--like India, for example--poses a controversial dilemma for today’s “third world” writers of formerly colonized (or post-colonial) countries around the world. Should they write in the European colonizers’ languages (e.g., English, French, German, Spanish) using Western literary forms (e.g., the novel)? Is it possible to use the Master’s languages and literary forms to “decolonize the mind”? Can these writers turn the Master’s language and literary form to the writers’ own purposes and cultural contexts? A quotation from Mikhail Bakhtin is relevant here: “Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the words, adapting it to his own . . . intention. . . . the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.” (From Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. 1981.) Writers like Nigerian Chinua Achebe and Pakhistani Bapsi Sidhwa think yes. Ngugi says no, believing language is a powerful tool for colonizing the mind, and he now writes only in Gikuyu.]

In Winnecott’s positive view of the power of the imaginary, Schwab sees the possibility of an effective "double strategy" through culture contact reading of literature in the "protected areas" of pleasurable "introjection" and in the "intermediate"/"transitional" spaces experiences in our reading histories and development--a form of non-destructive culture contact that can reorganize and reshape self-boundaries and create new inner coherences "based on change." She privileges literature as a way to experience otherness without "appropriating or erasing it." "At its best," such non-destructive culture contact "achieves a movement to the other that never returns to the same." (While Schwab never uses the term "empathy," her vision of literature’s transformative power is akin to the important role assigned non-ethnocentric and "informed" empathy by multicultural educators--see "Mapping Intercultural Developmental Models." Schwab posits her culture contact model of reader-response as an enabling theory centering the complexity and paradoxes and problems of dealing with cultural differences in reading literature. Her theory valorizes "responsiveness as a responsibility in respect to the Other," and asks us not to undervalue the role literature might play in multicultural efforts to "sharpe[n] our sensitivity and resistance to destructive forms of culture contact as well as our capacity for non-destructive ones."

[Postscript: Implicitly, Schwab seems to be saying that sitting down to read the right book can be transformative. Reading of the kinds of literature most likely to effect the kind of transformation Schwab envisions is becoming an increasingly infrequent habit outside school, in the U.S., according to Shirley Brice Heath (in Franzen). Further, Schwab neglects to consider how other popular cultural forms (e.g., film) of culture contact might achieve the same effects.]

These summaries were first prepared by Cora Agatucci in 1996, based on her Sabbatical research.

 

TOWARD NEW MODELS FOR
CROSS-CULTURAL READING AND INTERPRETATION
URL of this webpage: http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/ASA/MCsources/crcultreading.htm
Last updated: 31 August 2008
© Kathleen Walsh and Cora Agatucci, 2001

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