This paper deals with the writing of African American female poets as a text enacting the role of
postmodern border pedagogy which privileges difference. Divided into two parts, this paper first
analyzes the different goals of teaching literary texts set in different historical periods in the United
States. Then, with an aim to cultivate students’humanistic literacy and cultural internationalization, it
tries to positionalize the goals of teaching foreign literary texts at universities in Taiwan. In the second
part, it introduces postmodernism with its “new structure or mode of feeling”which privileges
difference and fights against hegemony as a typical unique border pedagogy. And, this part also
discusses the writing of African American female poets as an aesthetic discourse with pedagogical
value through offering a denoted cultural and political significance. Finally it concludes, a
well-designed curriculum of foreign literatures should make crucial postmodern concepts which
privilege difference central to the task of educating students to cultivate their humanistic literacy and
cultural internationalization. That is, such a curriculum can enact its role as a significant public force
for linking learning and social justice to the daily institutional and cultural traditions of society and
reshaping them in the process.
