Gita Rajan

Who are better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible
significance of an oppressed society? Who suffer the effects of oppres-
sion more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity
of liberation? They will not gain this liberation by chance but through
the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity
to fight for it.

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Freire's work represents a textual borderland where poetry slips into
politics, and solidarity becomes a song for the present begun in the past
while waiting to be heard in the future.

Henry Giroux, "Paulo Freire and the Politics of Postcolonialism"

In this chapter I explore the place of the racially marked "other" agent in
the Western academy, specifically in literature classrooms in the United
States, which are (already) constructed along purist, imperialistic, and
authoritative lines. In so doing, I will assess the cultural value placed upon
concepts such as the "body" of literature, the "body" permitted to appro-
priate and disseminate literature, and the "proper" knowledge required of
such an appropriating body in the academic marketplace, and thus, in this
laissez-faire. My aim is to examine the mediatory politics between and
amongst concepts such as the canon, the multicultural body-proper of the
teacher, and the power that possessing canonical knowledge grants the
teacher. I hold as a backdrop Paulo Freire powerful thesis from Pedagogy
of the Oppressed ¹ of gaining "literacy [knowledge]" as a gesture of resistance
against the cooption of the other's "body" (both as the racially marked
agent and as multicultural text) and as a mark of solidarity in educating

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