21e3 Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive » Race and Globalization

Race and Globalization

August 9, 2006

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

August 09th 2006 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion interrogates the ways that emotions work on and through us socially–to the point where “we” become social and individual beings precisely through this work.  Using a model of the “sociality” of emotions,” Ahmed shows that “it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others” (10).  A detailed analysis of emotions is therefore central to a proper understanding of individuals as well as collective groups–and, in fact, such an analysis reveals the way in which individuals and groups form each other. (Read the article)

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Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

August 09th 2006 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

Gayatri Gopinath ends the first chapter of Impossible Desires with a disclaimer of sorts regarding the cultural texts through which she analyzes queerness and diaspora: these “objects of inquiry,” she writes, “appear to be excessive, tangential, or marginal to recognized traditions” (28).  She focuses on the margins because, she goes on to write, it is precisely at those margins where representations and ideologies of sexuality and diaspora are created and negotiated.  Yet these marginal, tangential objects are often, she argues, parts of largue, more traditional texts–music, films, and novels (to name a few cultural forms) that represent and thus work to sustain “conventional gender, sexual, and nationalist ideologies” (28).  Impossible Desires is indebted to the diasporic cultural studies work of Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, and in keeping with this strain of cultural studies, Gopinath bases her analysis of queerness and diaspora on mainstream cultural objects and activities.

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Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Perverse Modernities Ser. Ed. Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.

August 09th 2006 Posted to Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization

M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred is a collection of essays, each of which in some way addresses–as primary critical focus or as implicit methodology–one or several aspects of transnational feminism.  Alexander writes on subjects as varied as the criminalization of gay sex in the Bahamas; the neocolonial marketing of white gay tourism; the relationship between the academy and the political mobilization of female factory workers; the connection between fiscal and curricular conservatism in the academy; the connection between colonialism, neocolonialism, and neo-imperialism and the way each is configured according to a logic of heteropatriarchy; the benefits of memory as a means of fighting the effects of domination; and the role of the Sacred as a politically efficacious model for rethinking the self outside frameworks such as secular postmodern alienation.  (Read the article)

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January 4, 2006

West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” Race, Identity and Representation in Education. Ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow. New York: Routledge, 1993.

January 04th 2006 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, African American, The Academy

In this article West announces the emergence of a new kind of cultural politics, marking “a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists” (11). West argues that previous forms of criticism can no longer account for the ethnic, gender and sexual diversity of late twentieth-century society. The new cultural politics that West promotes seeks to “trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in the light of the concrete, specific, and particular; to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing” (11). The new cultural critic, West argues, must work to form alliances with disempowered or disenfranchised groups to enable social action and must learn to critique their immediate work contexts (the academy, museum or gallery) from within (11-12). (Read the article)

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November 14, 2005

Suleri, Sara. “Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998. 116-125.

November 14th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, The Academy

In the context of the culture wars of the mid-1990s, Suleri calls for a reassessment of the terms under which we study gender and race, particularly as it is manifested in the discourse of postcolonial feminism. While Suleri is highly critical and ultimately dismissive of the popular contention that the academy is ceding itself solely to the issues of marginalized groups in the name of “political correctness,” she argues that it is necessary for academics to critique the very discourses under attack from the media. (Read the article)

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September 16, 2005

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Linguistic Utopias.” The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature. Eds. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe. New York: Methuen, 1987. 48-66.

September 16th 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Starting at Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities (1983) along with related theories of speech/discourse communities and subcultural communities (for which shared languages are an important identifying factor), Pratt argues for an understanding of community as partaking in a “linguistics of contact.” While those other theories are correct to suggest that imagined communities contribute to the formation or reinforcement of utopian and idealized systems, practicing a politics of exclusion which perpetuates modes of domination, what they fail to do is “see the dominant and the dominated in their relations to each other.” (56) Pratt argues that there is always a fluid interrelation between all such totalized communities through “contact zones,” or the places in which different discourse communities interact. Though Pratt does not say it here, one of those spaces is certainly in the classroom. (Read the article)

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September 9, 2005

McLaren, Peter and Ramin Farahmandpur. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005.

September 09th 2005 Posted to Critical Race Theory and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy, Public School Initiatives

In this book McLaren and Farahmandpur pose a Marxist critique of postmodern, liberal pedagogy, arguing that its emphasis on “diversity” and “multiculturalism” obscures underlying class issues. McLaren and Farahmandpur believe that in an age of global capitalism and neo-imperialism it has become critical for educators on all levels to acknowledge and resist capitalism in their classrooms: “In the space that follows, we attempt to sketch out in broad strokes the key characteristics of a socialist working-class pedagogy that attempts to move beyond liberal and Left-liberal efforts at making capitalist schooling less barbaric and more democratic. The democratic working-class pedagogy that we envision here agitates on behalf of pedagogical practice connected to a larger socialist project” (52). (Read the article)

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Race and Globalization Bibliography

September 09th 2005 Posted to Race and Globalization

Cashmore, E., ed. Dictionary of Race and Ethnic Relations. London: Routledge, 1994.

Castles, S. and Miller, M. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements
in the Modern World. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. (Read the article)

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August 31, 2005

Jay, Gregory and Gerald Graff. “A Critique of Critical Pedagogy.” Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities. Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995. pp. 201-213.

August 31st 2005 Posted to Race, Literacy and Pedagogy, Race and Globalization, Race, Class and Pedagogy

Jay and Graff argue that critical pedagogy is problematic because it claims to liberate students but in fact only reinforces the “banking” dynamic by forcing progressive ideologies upon students, enforcing a predetermined outcome based upon an assumed true position on the part of the teacher. Oppositional pedagogy makes the same mistake. Instead, the authors recommend a method of “teaching the conflicts,” where the unilateral teacher’s authority in the classroom is balanced by a “counterauthority,” thus opening the possibility for multiple points of view, all of which are laid open to critique. Suggestions for practical application follow. (Read the article)

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August 28, 2005

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993.

August 28th 2005 Posted to Race and the Academic Institution, Race, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Globalization, The Pleasures of Teaching Race

Addressing topics as diverse and as reciprocally relevant as theory, pedagogy, feminism, literature, music, and the media, Writing Diaspora argues for a rigorous reappraisal of cultural studies. Chow is wary of the explosion of area studies and cultural studies in the Western Academy, noting that “cross-cultural” study, with its attention to difference, can in fact reinscribe colonial “othering” and risks remaining “trapped within a type of discourse that is geographically deterministic and hence culturally essentialist” (7). (Read the article)

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