Student-centred, “embodied inter-referencing” as antiracist and anticolonial pedagogy

• In Event: Revisiting "Asia as Method": Toward ontologies and epistemologies of difference

Proposal

Reading the Fall 2019 student evaluations of my second-year Japanese literature course, Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Japanese Literature and Films, one student’s comment struck me. After pointing out how sex and gender are incredibly tied to race from their own experience of living in Vancouver, Canada, the student writes, “I hope there is more space for students to discuss what it means to be diasporic Asian females, males, and/or queers in Canada in connection to what we read in the course.” Alongside the decade-long, racist model-minority discourse that claims some Canadian universities, including the university where I teach, are “too Asian” (Findlay and Köhler 2010, Huynh 2020), the moment revealed that the Canadian academy was still fundamentally white on structural and epistemological levels where whiteness continues to be an assumed identity for the ideal student body.

This paper reflects on an experimental pedagogical approach I developed in the above course where the class demographic is predominantly students with Asian (mostly nonJapanese) heritages. Building on the intellectual movements of “Asia as method” (Chen 2010) and “diaspora as method” (Khoo 2019, Kim and Lee 2019) my project attempts to move beyond the convention of studying Asian culture by referencing western theory, knowledge, and experience. Instead, it employs “embodied interreferencing” (Park 2019) where students discuss what they learned from the course in relationship to their own, local experiences (Cheung 2004, Lin 2012, Troeung 2015) and engage in peer interactions in small groups. I also grapple with the question of how to decolonialize my pedagogy given that Japan has historically acted as the colonizer in Asia (Takayama 2016). When applying “Asia as method” to my pedagogy, it is important to recognize and actively examine the hierarchical power relations that exist within Asia and the role Japan has historically played in marginalizing and aggressively erasing knowledges of other Asian peoples through colonization.

This paper discusses how “embodied inter-referencing” allowed students to use their personal, family or community experiences to de-centre Japan while discussing Japanese texts and further to illuminate multi-layered relations of power that shape the transpacific world. In sum, my paper discusses the implications of recentring student experience and peer engagement for decolonial and antiracist pedagogy while teaching Japanese literature in a Canadian institutional context. I argue that the use of personal narrative in class discussions, when facilitated with care and nuance, creates a highly interactive space and a community of care where non-western texts become meaningful references to articulate students’ own complex experiences.

Author

• Ayaka Yoshimizu, University of British Columbia