bell hooks insists that ideas are not "neutral" (50). The English professor of yore, however, purported to be an objective disseminator of knowledge. What happens when that professor is replaced by a West African man or a South Asian woman? Global migration has resulted not only in a changing student body but in a changing cohort of English professors, and this new demographic often teaches in a manner that "talks back" to cultural hegemony. How might students in the American academy respond when canonical British or American texts are taught by someone they perceive as outside of that lineage and without claim to the canon? Or when professors teach both canonical and postcolonial texts in their historical and political contexts without shying away from the dialectic between literature and history or literature and politics? Is the exposition of epistemic violence perceived as a political agenda? Literature classes provide, or should provide, students with the skills to read the world as text, both critically and in context. But whose text, whose context, which literature, and, indeed, whose world? An intersectional academic approach to literary texts that interrogates the positions of power from which writing and cultural expression originate can be seen by students as somehow contaminative or even threatening. As Gayatri Spivak notes, the historian and the teacher of literature "must critically 'interrupt' each other, bring each other to crisis" (Other Worlds 241). This article explores contesting cultural, structural, and subject positions within the classroom and the academy. It discusses the problematics of ownership over stories in contemporary United States classrooms and interrogates the consequences of a pedagogical approach that foregrounds historicist/political analysis of literary texts.
