Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies

Transcultural Graffiti reads a range of texts – prose, poetry, drama – in several European languages as exemplars of diasporic writing. The book scrutinizes contemporary transcultural literary creation for the manner in which it gives hints about the teaching of literary studies in our postcolonial, globalizing era. Transcultural Graffiti suggest that cultural work, in particular transcultural work, assembles and collates material from various cultures in their moment of meeting. The teaching of such cultural collage in the classroom should equip students with the means to reflect upon and engage in cultural ‘bricolage’ themselves in the present day. The texts read – from Césaire’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest, via the diaspora fictions of Marica Bodrožic or David Dabydeen, to the post-9/11 poetry of New York poets – are understood as ‘graffiti’-like inscriptions, the result of fleeting encounters in a swiftly changing public world. Such texts provide impulses for a performative ‘risk’ pedagogy capable of modelling the ways in which our constitutive individual and social narratives are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed today.