Early World Literature and Restorative Justice

What is World Literature?

Defining World Literature (WL) will inevitably vary from classroom to classroom, in part, because there are many definitions and many ways of understanding WL. And also because world literature courses are often survey courses that must fulfill several curriculum requirements. In New Mexico, WL is part of the state’s general education curriculum. It meets the requirement of a New Mexico Lower-Division General Education Common Core Curriculum Area V: Humanities and Fine Arts. At UNM, it also meets the U.S. & Global Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Power Requirement. This means that we must fulfill these curricular requirements, and many instructors of WL are in a similar position as us.

For example, our course description must include the following information:

In this course, students will read representative world masterpieces from ancient, medieval, and renaissance literature. Students will broaden their understanding of literature and their knowledge of other cultures through exploration of how literature represents individuals, ideas and customs of world cultures. The course focuses strongly on examining the ways literature and culture intersect and define each other.

Nevertheless, we have also added the following information to the course description:

A general overview of early world literature and culture with a focus on the themes of community building and restorative justice. Readings will include all or parts of such works as the Epic of Gilgamesh; selections from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and the Qur’an; a play by Euripides; poetry by Sappho, Li Bai, Ono no Komachi, and Farid ud-dun Attar, among others. Our ambitious goal is to investigate texts from China, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Japan, Persia, Arabia, India, and the Americas by exploring how we can read texts through a restorative justice model. Through this mode of study, we will gain a sense of the differences and similarities that shape the varieties of human experience across time and cultures. We will also explore how the globalization of colonization affects our understanding of early world literature and how to decenter a Western gaze in the study of the past.

Beyond what is expected of a WL course such as this one, definitions of what world literature is have changed and continue to change. Here are five different definitions that have been used by scholars to define WL.²⁸⁸³⁵

• All the world’s literatures
• A selection of the best literatures worldwide (a hyper-canon of literature from across the world)
• Literatures that show a constant in human cultures (the stories seem to share the same themes)
• The processes of dissemination that helps “locally produced authors, texts, and literatures become globalized”
• Literature that was written with an international, global, or even transnational audience in mind

All these definitions work best if we hold them in mind as we study and think about WL, especially WL written before the 1700s. But these definitions don’t tell us why courses in world literature began to be taught in the nineteenth century, why did they become part of the academic curriculum in the twentieth, and why they received such renewed interest in the early twenty-first century all the way to today. In other words, there is a reason why courses of WL are included in state-mandated curriculums.

Let’s begin with some backstory: WL studies use literature to help us understand human movement because WL reflects “the rapid integration of the world” into a single market in which goods, including literature and art, travel constantly. WL has become such an important part of the classroom curriculum because it helps us grapple with our new worldly reality in which to be a citizen of the world is to have some rudimentary knowledge of several cultures from around the world, exemplified by Disney’s EPCOT theme park and its World Showcase. In other words, WL courses are meant to help us make sense of the world we live in. But just like the Disney’s World Showcase, which includes pavilions of Mexico, Norway, China, Germany, Italy, the United States, Japan, Morocco, France, United Kingdom, and Canada (there are concepts for a Russian and Switzerland pavilion, but these were not created), imagines the world as mostly White and Western (7/11 = 64%), WL courses also imagine WL as mostly white.

Oxford Bibliographies give some great insights into the reasons why we study WL and what were the underlying aims of creating these types of courses. As WL courses become a

selection of masterpieces from around the world. This serviceable notion [falls] below its own theoretical requirement and [is] clearly in need of revision, since the “world,” in practice, referred to the “First World,” and world literature had simply been another name for the classics from the five major European states—Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy—and from Russia and the United States. The urgent need to acknowledge and validate occluded regions of the non-Western world as unique literary and historical spaces that contribute to the whole has necessitated an altogether different framework for theorizing concepts such as language, nation, and masterpieces.

WL became a way to celebrate Western literature as the best literature in the world. Although many teachers of WL have begun to highlight literatures from around the world, most world literature courses continue to support Western perspectives. They do so because they continue to frame literature through Western frameworks of knowledge and knowledge–production.

Why Restorative Justice? An antiracist approach to Early World Literature

This book relies on restorative justice and anti-racist pedagogical frameworks to decenter “Western” perspectives as much as possible. We do so by prioritizing texts from Asia, Africa, and South America, and by selecting European texts that help us understand concepts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (Le Chanson de Roland) and feminism (Marie de France). We have moved away from presenting materials using historical or geographical modules, as we understand that these types of modules can uphold the ideology that “western civilization is the cradle of modern culture by creating, falsely, a sense of movement in which history, literature, philosophy, and power move from the southeast to the northwest.”¹⁶⁷⁷² Because these models suggest that modern civilization “occurs” in the West, they imply that “history” was always meant to transpire this way; they “assert and reify manifest destiny.”¹⁴¹²² These historical and geographical models also affect our understanding of world literature by often introducing literature from the Global Majority through a Western prism that often compares these texts with European literature.¹⁵⁴²² There is no better example of this than the persistent belief in the monomyth introduced by Joseph Campbell.

Instead, we have chosen to organize the book through modules that highlight distinct aspects of the literature: Epic and Adventure; Poetry and Transtemporal Solidarity; Sacred Texts; and Theater. We present these modules through a restorative justice model that challenges students to question why these texts were important to the communities that wrote them and why are they important to our communities today (why do we keep teaching them?). We also concentrate on community-building and community interests, reminding students that they are peers and should help each other to succeed.

Restorative Justice as Teaching Philosophy

From the first day of classes, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia explains to students that there is a difference between knowledge and expertise. “I tell them that as an expert in Medieval Studies, I am teaching them expertise—historical contexts, close reading analysis, how to apply theory, and so on. My expertise comes from earning a Ph.D. and learning how to read and analyze literature in nine medieval languages. My knowledge and knowledge production, however, come from my lived experiences—I am Puerto Rican, a mother, an academic, una hispanohablante, and a medievalist of color. I continue by emphasizing to them that I will help them achieve more expertise by teaching them critical analysis and other skills they might need in their lives, but it is their knowledge and knowledge production that makes them unique and valuable.” Finally, the class moves to an exercise that uses testimonio (how our lived experiences are an additional source of knowledge) and querencia (the places we love and love us back) to learn about each other’s expertise. The aim of this exercise is to push against the academic practice that continues to center whiteness as an objective type of knowledge that gets normalized as expertise. As the semester progresses, group work is framed as using knowledge to produce expertise.

Averie Bach’s experiences are different than Nahir’s: “The way our school systems work is not ideal. However, growing up, my learning style allowed me to flourish in academia and so I grew to adulthood being told that I was an ‘expert’ because of my knowledge, and that that knowledge made me ‘smart.’ I come from a white middle-class family, which came with a substantial amount of privilege that I was not aware of until much later. As a white woman, I am still subject to gender discrimination, but I still enjoy a considerable number of privileges. I adapted well to my elementary school environments, which were full of children that looked like me. I determined from a young age what made someone a ‘good’ student and was sure to mold myself to fit that model, but I was forgiven when I did not fit the model. As a result, I excelled in school and was celebrated for paying attention, being quiet, and doing my work on time. I became quiet, a bit withdrawn at times, and I took the teachers’ words as gospel. Essentially, I followed the rules but had no critical thinking skills, so set on being what was considered a ‘good’ student that I started to lose other aspects of my personality.”

Averie continues to explain how her experiences in high school prepared her for college: “By the time I entered college as a first-generation white woman, I had developed a passionate yet practical approach to education. I continued to succeed in classes because my public school system had the money and resources to prepare me well. Over and over, I was assured that I was ‘smart’ because of my quietly accumulated academic knowledge, but in truth, I am not ‘smart.’ I have expertise in a niche subject area, but I am lacking in so much basic knowledge—especially anything that does not fall under being book smart. My first wake-up call was studying abroad in Cork, Ireland, where I had to fend for myself without a safety network of ‘real’ adults nearby, but even then, I still fit in because I looked like the people around me and I spoke the same (or mostly the same) language.” Averie was consistently told that her knowledge was her expertise, and although this has benefited her in many ways, it has also disempowered her to take ownership of what she brings to her studies—her amazing critical thinking skills.

This framework is part of our move to use Restorative Justice (RJ) as a teaching philosophy. RJ begins with the premise that we need community to feel heard, we need community to be empowered, and we need community to want forgiveness and accountability. Restorative Justice provides a different perspective to conflict resolution than what we often prioritize in our classrooms. In the context of Early World Literature, an entry level college course, RJ encourages us to consider why it is that the communities that created these texts found them so appealing and why it is that our modern communities continue to find them important. The answers vary from text to text: humans err and can make mistakes (Gilgamesh), storytelling creates healing and everyone deserves a chance at redemption (A Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights), poetry creates transtemporal solidarity by evoking similar feelings in past as well as present-day readers (poetry of the Tang period).

Our aim is to redesign the course away from a model that overrepresents European texts with only a few Asian and African texts. These models uphold the idea that Europe represents the world, and that Europe created the best world literature. This course breaks with this narrative by prioritizing texts from the Global South and by teaching students to curb their need to understand this literature through a Western prism. RJ also asks students to acknowledge that racism and colonialism affects our study of these texts as cultural and material artifacts, most of which have been looted away from the Global South to European libraries and museums. In other words, RJ asks that we use our knowledge and expertise as scholars to restore dignity to the histories of these texts and to the stories within them.

The Circle Process and the Classroom

The most powerful tool of RJ is the circle process—sharing circles, talking circles, listening circles, healing circles, peacemaking circles. The circle process helps to foster community by creating an environment in which people can speak and listen to each other.

The circle process establishes a very different style of communication. Rather than aggressively debating and challenging each other, which often involves only a few of the more assertive individuals, the circle process establishes a safe nonhierarchical place in which all people present have the opportunity to speak without interruptions. Rather than active verbal facilitation, communication is regulated through the passing of an object. The talking stick, or another object, fosters respectful listening and reflection. It prevents one-to-one debating or attacking.¹³⁸⁷

In RJ, the circle process helps to repair harm by asking what happened (as supposed to what did you do). As a classroom tool, the circle can also foster classroom learning.

At the University level, restorative justice becomes a philosophy of teaching that seeks growth, active learning, and deep involvement of the students (and the teachers).

An important aspect of the circle process, as Alaina Winters explains, is active listening and participation: “Both talking and listening are important in the circle because mutual understanding lays the groundwork for deeper, more meaningful discussion” (1). Furthermore:

Talking circles can be used for discussion, problem solving, and/or decision making. The basic purpose of a talking circle is to create a safe, non-judgmental place where each participant has the opportunity to contribute to the discussion of difficult and/or important issues. The intent is to provide a safe place for connection and dialogue, meaning that all participants are open to being influenced by what happens during the process and do not enter the process hoping to persuade others or expecting a specific outcome. This can be hard for teachers to come to terms with when they are used to directing class, lecturing, or being the sole content expert (1).²⁹¹³¹

Talking circles are effective ways to create community and foster student participation. By having students answer questions through this process, not only do we have every student participate, but we also have every student listen to each other.

We are thrilled to present this open-source book on Early World Literature and Restorative Justice. Although we are organizing the book as a textbook for World Literature courses, we believe that many, if not all our exercises, can be adapted to be part of the humanities curriculum.