SOURCE: Grobman, Laurie. “Toward a Multicultural Pedagogy: Literary and Nonliterary Traditions.” MELUS 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 221-40.

In the following essay, Grobman explores how multicultural literature has—or has not—been integrated into the teaching of modern literary theory, commenting that, “[when we allow and encourage our students to consider a text in its many literary and nonliterary traditions, we bring students into the debates of multiculturalism.”]

Introduction: Multicultural Critical Backgrounds

Over the last two decades, coincident with the broadening of the literary canon, multicultural scholars have produced a vast amount of critical and pedagogical literature. Despite these advances, though, and despite a broad consensus about the moral and political goals of our work in and out of the classroom—that we have, as Doris Davenport suggests, a “moral imperative” (66) to teach it—we lack a coherent pedagogy. John Alberti accurately asserts that multicultural scholarship has adequately addressed changing...