Hey bloggers!
These past few weeks, my University English class (ASTU 100) has been broadly thinking about the idea of globalization and national identity, and more recently tying it in to Farhat Shazad’s scholarly article: “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning”. The article explores how all students have what Shazad refers to as “interpretive communities”, which are essentially any person or group of people who influence a person’s perspective. Everyone has interpretive communities. My fellow student Priya Adhikari spoke in her blog entry about how the bias of the media strongly affects our interpretation of our realities, and for her, this presented a dominant narrative. In many cases, the media is a very powerful interpretive community; however, family, friends, and cultural, religious and classroom settings have incalculable influence on how an individual sees the world, which is something that blogger Jennifer Lai‘s post touched on as well. Ina de Weerdt explored how a community with a shared experience can be an important interpretive community because together they can shape their memories, transforming their narratives into positive or constructive realities to inform on the issue. Branching from this topic, Jacqueline Desantis proposed the interesting argument of whether bias or (in another light), perspective, makes a memory more or less valuable. This can be linked to interesting points from Taylor Khatkar‘s blog where she discussed two central questions: A) If anything could be learned free of bias, and B) If so, was there any purpose to it? She, like Jacqueline, addresses the thought that “no memory exists in a vacuum” (Jacqueline) and in so doing accepts that there can indeed be no learning free from bias, leading to a conclusion that learners should be exposed to a variety of different perspectives, to at least open them to a balance of narratives. I personally thought this was interesting because it places a weighty responsibility on the teachers in our society, to make an effort to see that young minds do not grow on one singular viewpoint. Kaveel Singh discussed the role of the teacher as well. He saw an example in himself wherein he was taught something at a young age which, because of the authority of his teacher who told him, he assumed to be true. It’s worth mentioning that this is not to say that it wasn’t true, but merely to promote awareness of the fact that one person had maybe disproportionate control over the lens through which Kaveel looked at a certain issue. Teaching “single story” (Taylor) can lead to single mindedness, which is a theme central to Taylor’s blog post, where she mentioned a woman from Africa whose childhood was spent trying to identify with an interpretive community of British and American authors through their books. She didn’t relate to them, but saw only their version of the world of literature, until much later. I think this is interesting because it shows that interpretive communities and, in a more macro sense, cultures, can have huge influence, seen and unseen, over something as personal as the issue of identity. Bloggers Kihan Yoon-Henderson, Ken Sakamoto both wrote about this issue as well. Kihan wrote about her identity as a half Korean, half Anglo-Canadian as being affected and in some ways isolated no matter whether she was ingratiating herself into western “white” culture or in Korea. This fostered an interpretive-communiy-driven identity crisis the likes of which seemed to have been shared by Ken and Raphael Gamo, as they navigated their multinational affiliations in a world in tension between globalization and cultural division. Kristen Lew continued this discussion, adding that cultural and especially language degradation is a real concern of globalization, as exciting as the concept is. I was particularly fascinated with the blog discussions that centered around these globalized ideas, and how identity is changed in a modernizing world, and the personal experiences that show the massive affect that different interpretive communities do have on an individual trying to find their way in the world.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the fascinating ideas being discussed!
See you next time,
Nicola Cox
