The rise of the unsaid: Spaces in teaching postcolonial literature

Teaching postcolonial literature can be a daunting undertaking that teachers may try to avoid. This article explores three problems that teachers may confront in teaching postcolonial texts. The first problem deals with which literary text to choose and the criteria that may help teachers anchor their choices. Second, in response to the question of how teachers pedagogically assist students to correct preconceived notions and deconstruct stereotypes, this article proposes three stages of creating and recreating spaces that interact and ultimately assist students generate meaning. Students move from prior knowledge into an informed reality guided by the teacher and then into the world of the text in a process that involves collaborative learning, reinventing conceptual realities and the concretization of literary texts. Third, I examine how to approach postcolonial texts by utilizing Isers aesthetic act of reading. The work posits a teaching model of three phases that help students interact and eventually unlock assumed unfamiliarity with postcolonial texts.