Inexplicable Desire, Pedagogical Compulsion: Teaching the Literatures of the Middle East

Abstract

Every few years, I feel compelled to venture into territory that all logic dictates I should shy away from. It is a form of penance, if you will, a form of supplication to the great God of pedagogy, a reminder to be humble and to make oneself vulnerable and admit cluelessness (I take the word from Gerald Graff’s book Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, though Graff focuses on the students’ cluelessness in the face of instructors’ opaque presentations). About ten years ago, I entered apprehensively into such territory when I developed and taught a course on postapartheid South Africa, not a region I had any formal expertise on, but for which I had an unshakeable fascination—one that was personal, geopolitical, and humanistic. In the process of developing and teaching the course, I like to think I made the journey from cluelessness to “partial knowing” and, I would hope, enticed the students to make a similar journey and to hunger for more such ventures.