Thinking Globally, Teaching Locally: The “Nervous Conditions” of Cross-Cultural Literacy
Lisa Eck

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification.  In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters.  With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different in key ways from them.  Finally, students use the differences they have found to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle.  The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

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