Literature and Literacy Education in Multicultural and Multilingual Settings from the Perspectives of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation

Abstract

Literature has been considered a bridge among people, their languages, and their cultures. However, it has often been used as an object of multiple analyses that seem to provide aprioristic views of cultures and languages, the writers, and the narratives they tend to represent. This paper addresses the question of the role of literature and literacy education in today's multicultural and multilingual classrooms. It explores Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands and Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation to provide a means to understand these writers ' own relationships with the languages and the cultures they recognized they were both part of and alien to. The paper also strives to describe the composition (writing) and literature classroom taking into considerations these writers' experiences, reflections, and scholarly works as members of multilingual and multicultural societies.