Review of Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies, by Russell West-Pavlov

Abstract

Teaching occupies a beguiling, often terrifying, and consistently ambiguous space in the life of a Humanities academic. And as the pressures grow for scholars to intensify their research output without sacrificing the quality of their teaching, thinking through the relationship between teaching and research is a particular challenge. Russell West-Pavlov, like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Elaine Showalter, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others, offers his project as an example of the ways in which research and teaching can be positively integrated. He is concerned with looking at ways in which the 'previous marginality of teaching begins to be cast into question', by 'transforming' rather than 'reversing' the relationship between research and teaching (15). He argues for a model of research in which the 'possible pedagogical implications are integrated as a central element from the outset' (15).