‘From Behind the Veil’: Teaching the Literature of the Enemy

The purpose of this article is to dramatize what can happen when educators teach literature for cross-cultural understanding, especially when the literature being taught is written by citizens of a country with which the students' country is at war. It contains a deep description of the events of one class in the United States in the fall of 1990 on the eve of the first Gulf War, and it theorizes these events in light of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. It employs the transnational perspective of linguists such as A. Suresh Canagarajah and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, the critical psychology of Fyodor Vasilyuk, the postmodern theory of Bill Readings, and the spiritual theory of Peter Gabel to conclude with a call for teaching literature with a vision for cross-cultural understanding.