Critical Teaching about Asia: Orientalism, Postcolonial Perspectives and Cross-cultural Education

Abstract

This paper explores the ways to develop a curriculum and pedagogy to teach Asian cultures and histories to US students – and by implication to students in the West – from critical postcolonial perspectives. In particular, by examining studies of Japan as an example, it identifies and discusses several key issues, including application of the concept of Orientalism, (commonsensical) binary oppositions that lurk in cross-cultural studies and understandings, and cultural essentialisms and nationalisms that emerge in (de-colonised and modernising) Asian nations. The paper argues that postcolonial perspectives can offer us a set of useful theoretical tools to counteract the hegemonic ways of teaching and studying about Asia.

Keywords:

• cross-cultural education
• curriculum theory
• postcolonial theory
• teaching about Asia

Acknowledgements

I thank Hiromitsu Inokuchi, Allan Luke, Richard Minear and Lew Zippin for their comments on the earlier drafts and for their encouragement and support of my work. I am also grateful to the editors of Journal of Intercultural Studies for their kind assistance and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yoshiko Nozaki

Yoshiko Nozaki is an associate professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her co-edited book, Struggles over Difference: Curriculum, Texts, and Pedagogy in the Asia-Pacific (SUNY Press), won the American Educational Research Association Division B Curriculum Studies Outstanding Book Award. As a leading scholar on the Japanese history textbook controversy, she has also published War Memory, Nationalism, and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945–2007: The Japanese History Textbook Controversy and Ienaga Saburo's Court Challenges (Routledge)