Race and Pedagogy Project - Research Archive

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

S. C. — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:02:05 +0000

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.

Ahmed’s critical frame is both psychoanalytic and Marxist, and she draws on queer/feminist scholars–such as Butler, Berlant, and Brown–who similarly, if to greater or lesser degrees, work in psychoanalytically-sympathetic modes to analyze social structures (11-12). Ahmed uses Marxism and psychoanalysis to probe and complicate on another, and in this regard her book is iin implicit dialogue with work as diverse as Herbert Marcuse’s sociohistoricization of Freud in Eros and Civilization or Cathy Caruth’s study of culture and trauma in Unclaimed Experience. While Ahmed’s predominant methodology throughout is psychoanalytic, she couples this with a strong focus on the circulation of emotion and a reinterpretation of “the subject” of more traditional psychoanalytic inquiry. An affective economy, she writes, means that the “subject” “is simply one nodal point in the economy […] the sideways and backwards movement of emotions such as hate is not contained within the countours of a subject” (46). In fact, as she explains in her chapter on “The Contingency of Pain,” an emotion such as pain “involves the violation or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through this transgression that I feel the border in the first place” (27). Pain, in other words, creates a sense of self paradoxically by making the self aware of the violation of that very self-constituting border. Rather than private, pain is contingent on a greater social experience. This contingency makes pain a political issue–and makes the sociality of pain a matter for ethical debate.

Ahmed argues that pain enters the political register through the ways in which it is evoked in public language. Through discourse, pain is frequently described as something solitary, something only the person experiencing the pain can really feel. At the same time, the evocation of pain through discourse demands a reaction. Pain must have a witness, even if that witness can only ever fail to fully understand. An ethics of pain, therefore, involves “being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel” (30). In the move from ethics to politics, however, Ahmed warns against the fetishization and/or commodification of suffering in the political arena (32). The danger is in politicizing pain through “claims for compensation” as well as through speech (31). Ahmed advocates harrative as a way in which pain can be told and heard by another. Noting the dangerous use of testimonials for the appropriation of individual pain in the service of creating a fetishized national pain, she writes that we must nevertheless hear and remember the other’s pain. It is through the stories of pain that the pained body comes aligned with other bodies. Such stories operate as a political call to action: they are a call based on “learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one” (39). Ahmed suggests that emotions such as pain create a sense of subjectivity through the relation of the subject to the collective. In her terminology, emotions act on bodies and create the sense of bodily borders. All of this happens through language, through the ways that emotions are mobilized discursively and the ways that felt emotions are, in turn, told to others.

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

S. C. — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:53:34 +0000

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.

In Chapter Three, “Surviving Naipaul: Housing Masculinity in A House for Mr. Biswas, Surviving Sabu, and East Is East,” Gopinath performs two cultural readings. The first illustrates the way Ian Rashid’s film Surviving Sabu is a kind of critical rereading of Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr. Biswas, one that complicates race and masculinity from a postcolonial standpoint. Gopinath’s reading of the film and novel makes a cultural studies argument, for by analyzing these two popular texts, she intends to show the ways in which idologiy is both represented and contexted in venues outside more “official” discourses such as law, science, history, or social science. Her second reading complicates this first analysis. She goes on to write that for all the revisions Surviving Sabu effects in the name of alternative sexuality, such work is done at the expense of queer female diasporic subjectivity. Instead of rejecting or accepting queerness, contemporary Bollywood cinema, for example, “manages queerness” by “simultaneously acknowledg[ing], contain[ing], and disavow[ing]” that queerness as specifically queer male desire (190).

Impossible Desires makes a cultural argument about the marginalization of queer female diasporic subjectivity and bases this claim on evidence extracted from popular cultural forms. Noting how this female subject position is absent from cultural representation, Gopinath undertakes in her book to formulate, through her critical re-readings of these popular texts, “a diasporic frame of analysis that is at once queer and feminist” (91). Gopinath reads her chosen texts for those brief, apparently inconsequential moments where impossible/invisible queer female desire can be detected. Using absences as evidence, Gopinath works to formulate ways of reading that will “transform” such “impossible” or absent representations into “vibrant, livable spaces of possibility” (194).

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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.

S. C. — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 19:25:11 +0000

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. Alexander’s topics–or sites, as she would say–span several geopolitical borders, cross time, and address texts as assorted as legal discourse, feminist theory, literary fiction, and personal narrative. She titles her book Pedagogies of Crossing in order to bring the “central metaphor” of the Middle Passage to bear on “the imperative of making the world in which we live intelligible to ourselves and to each other,” or the act of “teaching ourselves” (6). The pedagogies offered in this text are ones that themselves cross borders: classroom to factory, personal to political, writer to reader. The declared theoretical nature of Alexander’s pedagogies draws attention to one of the predominant theoretical focuses in her text, namely transnational feminism. Indeed, like pedagogies themselves, transnational feminism operates variously here as object of inquiry, as methodology, and, in revised form, as suggestive potential.

The analytic foundation of Alexander’s argument in her fifth chapter on “Transnationalism, Sexuality, and the State,” for example, is the relationship between transnational feminism and sexuality studies, and the ways “transnational” is (mis)read as always culturally relative. Using as examples the Feminist Majority’s implication in imperial ventures and the reception of “Third World” texts in feminist classrooms as “absolute alterity,” Alexander reveals two of the many uses to which the category of “transnational” has been put (183). Her turn to the three national sites and systems of domination which heteropatriarchy serves–indigenous American colonization, Anglophone Caribbean neocolonialism, and United States neo-imperialism–is itself, then, a recovery of transnational feminism from its relativist connotations, and a blending of this analytic frame with sexuality studies. In this move from treating transnational feminism as object of analytic critique to method through which to critique heteropatriarchy and the states it supports, Alexander demonstrates the ways in which categories can become processes–a shift that has much more troubling consequences in the case of heterosexuality itself.

Heterosexuality, Alexander clarifies, is “neither a stable ontological identity nor a fixed process,” and this instability between identity and process evokes in it a sense of anxiety (207). Pointing to, among other examples, the Military Working Group’s decision that homosexuality is incompatable with the military, Alexander uses the group’s sexual taxonomy to show how the drive to define the homosexual serves the formation of heterosexual identity as well as the state itself:

“Homosexuality was ‘the quality, condition, or fact of being homosexual,’ while sexual orientation was defined as ‘a sexual attraction to individuals or a particular gender.’ Within this bounded system that turns inward on itself, particularly in its definitions of acts and conduct, sex (by which is meant sodomy), sexual desire, and sexual attraction turns into homosexual persons. They become, in Janet Halley’s terms, ‘metonyms of one another.’” (201)

Using the working group’s language of definition here, Alexander reveals the way identity categories such as “homosexual” are caught up in a circular logic that produces identity as sex acts itself. The result of this metonymic slide is that by identifying homosexuality with sexual desire in this totalizing way, there seems to be nothing left in the identity of the homosexual outside of sex. One of the military’s problems with this is that, being defined as so totally at one with sexual desire, the homosexual is therefore perceived as not being able to follow the military chain of command–as not being able to follow two masters. This threatens not only national security (the borders of the state) but heterosexuality itself through another metonymic slide in which the state becomes synonymous with heterosexuality (by way of a logic of tradition and parent-child inheritance of national values). “Heterosexual anxiety seems bent on continuing to be imprisoned in this violent geneaology,” Alexander writes: her return to transnational feminism at the end of the chapter suggests ways that indeterminacy and flux between category and process need not always evoke anxiety and imperialism (205). Calling for interdisciplinarity and work that crosses gender, sexual, and nation borders, Alexander closes her chapter with the suggestion that the transnationl not lose its historical situatedness. The category of transnational feminism is thus implicitly revised here, understood as one of several frameworks that, together with queer studies, can challenge rather than support the cohesion between sexuality and political economy.

Zhou, Min and Susan S. Kim. “Community Forces, Social Capital, and Educational Achievement: The Case of Supplementary Education in the Chinese and Korean Immigrant Communities,”Harvard Educational Review. 76.1(2006), 1-26.

K. V. — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 17:22:19 +0000

Abstract: “Extraordinary Asian American educational achievement has often been credited to a common cultural influence of Confucianism that emphasizes education, family honor, discipline, and respect for authority. In this article, Min Zhou and Susan Kim argue that immigration selectivity, higher than average levels of premigration and postmigration socioeconomic status, and ethnic social structures interact to create unique patterns of adaptation and social environments conducive to educational achievement. This article seeks to unpack the ethnic effect through a comparative analysis of the ethnic system of supplementary education that has developed in two immigrant communities–Chinese and Korean–in the United States. The study suggests that the cultural attributes of a group interact substantially with structural factors, particularly tangible ethnic social structures on which community forces are sustained and social capital is formed. The authors conclude that ‘culture’ is not static and requires structural support to constantly adapt to new situations.”

Brandt, Deborah. “‘The Power of It’: Sponsors of Literacy in African American Lives.” Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 105-145.

B. T. S. — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 18:29:39 +0000

At large, this study traces the changing aspects, practices, and effects of literacy in the 20th century United States through the analysis of more than 80 case histories ranging from 1895 to 1985. The chapter annotated here is concerned with the different challenges and techniques in literacy sponsorship encountered by African Americans due to issues of class and institutionalized racism.

Brandt’s overarching thesis is that “in twentieth-century America, literacy became increasingly reliant on economic sponsorship and grew increasingly vulnerable to the lack of it” (106). Her investigation in this chapter reveals that the history of African American literacy in the twentieth century both supports and complicates this thesis. On the one hand, the concurrent yoking of literacy with ideology and power served to impede economic advantage and to reinscribe racist constructs: “As literacy grew more useful for gaining economic advantage, it developed new ideological uses for preserving white skin advantage” (106). Yet the perpetuation throughout the twentieth century of economic disadvantage and institutionalized racism as impediments to African American literacy belies the fact that African American literacy rates nonetheless rose by 65% from 1910 to 1970, at which point some 95% of African Americans could read and write (106). This dramatic rise in literacy, she argues, was supported by a strong network of alternative political and cultural support systems which successfully sponsored African American literacy despite the economic and institutional forces that most often worked against it.

“In the face of economic exclusion these agents circulated resources and nurtured skills, including literacy, all within what several sociologists have identified as a core set of cultural values. These values include self-determination, freedom, education, advancement, and, often, a unity between religious and secular existence. Within circumscribed economic and political conditions, these concentrated sites of sponsorship were the deep wells that fed a steady rise in literacy and education rates among African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. In many cases, these sponsors remained intact and central to literacy development even as political and economic opportunity expanded in the century’s second half” (107).

Rather than paying attention to institutional histories of movements or the stories of famous leaders and teachers, Brandt continues the case history focus of her project here, treating through her interviews “the lives of ordinary people and focus[ing] on the means and material conditions of their literacy learning – how it was that they came in contact with sponsors and, in fact, how their literacy was recruited to the cause of those sponsors” (108). Through detailed case analyses and sub-sections of the chapter, Brandt explores how the church, the press, educators, and the mass civil rights movement – all cultural institutions originally developed to help African Americans defeat slavery and achieve social equality – became chief sites for the sponsorship of African American literacy. It is the interrelation of these politically and socially driven organizations that leads Brandt to the conclusion that literacy and social activism in African American lives became inextricably linked during the twentieth century, and continue to feed each others movements to the present time.

Connolly, Clara and Pragna Patel. “Women Who Walk on Water: Working across ‘Race’ in Women Against Fundamentalism.” The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. 375-95.

S. C. — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 21:52:10 +0000

Clara Connolly and Pragna Patel’s “Women Who Walk on Water: Working across ‘Race’ in Women Against Fundamentalism” articulates the authors’ dissatisfaction with religious fundamentalism and argues that British multiculturalism—frequently seen as a liberal and progressive project—is ill-equipped to mediate the inequalities facing minority groups both within their cultures and within British society at large. Using the examples of their involvement in the feminist organizations Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) and Southall Black Sisters (SBS), Connolly and Patel describe their personal participation in the struggle against racism and gender oppression, using these narratives to then analyze and critique multiculturalism. Their focus on gender, racism, fundamentalism, and multiculturalism leads them to frequently note the way these issues yoke together in complex and, at times, seemingly contradictory ways. For instance, Patel becomes involved in SBS in order to join “struggles against forced arranged marriage that many women faced within the family, and the struggles against racism […] where other non-Asian children and teachers reminded us of our marginal positions within British society” (376). While thus beginning the essay with a critique of fundamentalism, Connolly and Patel explain that fundamentalism’s negative effects are exacerbated and even institutionalized in a multiculturalist British society that endorses an ostensible “mutual tolerance of difference” between majority and minority groups, and which is loathe to intercede on the behalf of those oppressed (i.e. women) within those groups (388). In fact, this so-called “celebration of diversity” silences the subjugation of women within fundamentalist-dominated minority groups while simultaneously maintaining an us/them racist mentality: multicultural policies assume the minority group is internally cohesive. The policies are therefore “ultimately based on essentialist constructions of culture/religion that tend to homogenize both minority and majority communities” (392). Both communities are fixed, through multiculturalism, in an unequal relation to one another, so that “far from being tolerant, the modern British state in fact practices a form of secularism that is intolerant of minority communities even where it appears to permit and maintain their cultural autonomy” (392). The state’s offered democracy is as unsatisfactory to women as the fundamentalist communities of which they are subjugated members.

The solution to this dilemma rests, for Connolly and Patel, in a reworking of the multiculturalist state. The essay is organized into two parts: separately authored analyses through personal narrative, and a collectively authored argument against multiculturalism and fundamentalism as it is sanctioned by the state. Throughout both parts, however, the authors weave in court battles and legal disputes as representative examples of the issues at hand. The essay’s criticism of the state is thus undertaken with the understanding that reform of the state is possible: how, the authors ask, can we transform the British Christian secular state, how can we “reappropriate the term secularism and prevent this fundamental principle of democracy from being transformed into a mere front or guise” through which the dominant group exerts power (392-93)? WAF—and the authors—seek an answer through activism on the political field. Thus they challenge democracy as it is practiced through multiculturalism, and thus they work against inequalities in both minority communities and the state, fighting fundamentalism and racism simultaneously if not unilaterally. Throughout the essay, Connolly and Patel emphasize the diversity of experiences constituting the individuals and interests represented by groups such as WAF and SBS. They eschew the “mournful pleasures of identity politics, which stressed and celebrated difference at the expense of alliance,” but they also note the uneasy politics present in alliance (384). As Patel writes in reference to a case about an Asian woman accused of killing her husband, “We brought attention to the specificity of her experiences as an Asian woman, yet avoided stereotyping the issue as an ‘Asian’ concern only; ultimately our demands were ones that benefit all women” (382). Without claiming that “all women are this woman,” Patel explains instead the way in which SBS works to articulate the case in terms of race that nevertheless has broader implications for women, regardless of their particular community. The essay works, in this way, on the border of minority communities, simultaneously validating and critiquing such categorizations. The formal choice to draw personal narrative and more objective analysis together mirrors this two-pronged approach to the issue. Metaphorically, then, the breakdown between personal narrative and objective analysis—for the two bleed together in each of the two parts—helps to rhetorically prepare the reader for the way the authors will ultimately re-define “community” through “An oppositional version of pluralism” that “would accept the absence of social cohesion as its foundation” (388).

This piece concludes with a rethinking of the multicultural state and a documentation of its failure to address its own internal racism as well as the oppression of those within minority communities; it begins with an address to the dangers of fundamentalism, at the heart of which “is the control of women’s minds and bodies” (375). Because of its status within the fundamentalist context, gender inequality is central to the issues raised by Connolly and Patel—as well as to the WAF and SBS groups they discuss. Rather than reducing all issues to simple female inequality, however, the authors are particularly attuned to the ways gender relates to race and class. Yet, as Patel notes in charting the development of SBS, the group has “moved away from a mechanistic understanding of how race, class, and gender intersect in black women’s lives to one that allows us to unravel the complexities of our positions, one that permits us to act out in terms of those complexities in order to achieve empowerment and autonomy” (380, emphasis mine). Notably, WAF was formed in 1989 in response to the fatwa placed against Salman Rushdie: gender oppression was, from the founding moment of the organization, understood in expansive terms linking it to all forms of dissidence to patriarchy. As Patel explains, “If Rushdie could be silenced by religious fundamentalists, then so too could women” (377). Rushdie, Connolly explains by way of Homi Bhabha, is dangerous in that he questions national identity and suggests “forging alternative social identities and practices” (385). The link between Rushdie and feminism is, then, one that allows the authors to explain their attempts to create “solidarity with dissident movements all over the postcolonial world” (384). Rushdie’s plight resonates with Connolly’s more personal knowledge of outlawed novelists in the Irish Catholic context. Focusing on Rushdie-as-writer, Connolly implicitly connects authors and women through their similar oppression. The essay, then, models as well as describes an alternative community forged through oppositional pluralism.

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Champagne, Duane. “American Indian Studies is for Everyone.”American Indian Quarterly. 20.1(1996), 77-82.

K. V. — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 02:58:20 +0000

In this article Champagne addresses the concerns of American Indian studies scholars who believe that only Indians are qualified to study Indian life, history and culture. As a counter to these critics’ claims, Champagne writes that, “To say that only Indians can study Indians goes too far toward excluding American Indian culture and history from the rest of human history and culture…Indian nations are human groups, part of the broad history of all humanity, and therefore can be compared with other groups in technology, cultural world views, history and adaptation to global markets and expanding state systems, etc. One does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way” (77).

According to Champagne, one of the main concerns Indian studies scholars have is that, while they may acknowledge colonial pillage and military destruction, non-Indian scholars often ignore the culturally specific ways in which Indian nations have survived 500 years of oppression (78). Champagne counters this critique by pointing out that “rigorous study, fieldwork, and a sensitive orientation will reward scholars, Indian and non-Indian” (78). Both non-Indian and Indian scholars, he argues, are equally capable of attending to the unique histories and needs of specific tribes.

A second concern of many Indian scholars is that the anthropologists of the 1960s and ‘70s collected data in an indifferent way and that their studies resulted in little benefit to the host community. Champagne responds to this, writing that “Certainly exploitative and intrusive research should be condemned, and universities and academic disciplines need to revise and enforce their ethical codes for research conducted in Indian communities” (79). Ultimately, Champagne argues that academics in American Indian Studies programs should be judged on their merit as conscientious and rigorous scholars rather than on whether or not their have an “inside” understanding of Indian cultures.

Connolly, Mark R. “What’s in a Name? A Historical Look at Native American-Related Nicknames and Symbols at Three U.S. Universities.” The Journal of Higher Education. 71.5 (2000), 515-547.

K. V. — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 20:00:42 +0000

In this article Connolly examines the arguments surrounding the use of Native American-Related nicknames and mascots at three U.S. Universities: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (the “Fighting Illini”), Miami University in Ohio (the “Redskins”) and Eastern Michigan University (the “Hurons”). After reviewing the history behind these nicknames and examining the controversies surrounding them, Connoly concludes that the attitudes many universities adopt towards Native American nicknames reflects a kind of institutional racism that must be dealt with not just by changing the university’s mascot but by implementing fundamental changes in school policy and attitudes.

Connolly traces the popularity of Native American nicknames at these three schools back to the rise of school booster culture of the 1920s and 30s. During these decades university enrollment swelled by nearly five times and school football and basketball teams became the source of regional pride (531). Frequently, those most invested in school booster culture were white upper-and middle-class men (531). The adoption of specifically Native American-related nicknames both represented a sense of regional pride and tapped into the cultural fantasy of the “noble savage,” a sentimentalized and caricatured version of Native American cultures popular at the beginning of the 20th century.

Connolly lays out the debate overNative American nicknames in the following terms: “The use of such nicknames and symbols, say their critics, demeans Native Americans by reducing them to caricatures and stereotypes. Yet, to alumni, students and other faithful supporters of these institutions and their athletic teams, the nicknames and logos represent long-standing traditions. And they agree that rather than denigrating Native Americans, such nicknames serve to honor tribes that might otherwise be forgotten” (515-516).

Starting in the 1960s several groups began to question the use of stereotyped (and largely inaccurate) Native American nicknames and symbols. Schools responded either by authenticizing the symbols (thus Miami University provided their mascot “Chief Hiawabop” with a more “authentic” costume and dance) or by changing the school nickname altogether (for example, in 1991, EMU changed its name from the “Hurons” to the “Eagles”). However, Connolly notes that “making a mascot or logo less cartoonish and more realistic only emphasized how humiliating and oppressive using a Native American image as a sports logo or half-time cheerleader feels to living Native Americans” (534). Furthermore, the rapid uprooting of a school nickname can be extremely contentious. Connolly suggests that “a negotiated approach, characterized by some sense of give-and-take, may help booster culture surrender shared symbols while giving them time to adapt to changes” (540).

Ultimately, Connolly argues that Native American nicknames and symbols must be discarded. He points out that gathering and disseminating historical information about both the symbols and the Native American tribes associated with them, as well as getting boosters to understand how their symbols are stereotypical and racist are key elements in ridding schools of these nicknames. He also notes, however, that eliminating the offending nickname will not resolve the underlying problem of institutional racism: “When administrators and trustees see the nickname as the only problem, they are treating only symptoms and not the oppressive attitudes and practices they reflect” (541). Connolly adds that, “as an institution of higher education, the college or university should use the controversy as an opportunity to teach its staff, students and faculty how to identify and expose other emblems of discrimination and prejudice” (541).

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

K. V. — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 01:22:35 +0000

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).

West begins by reviewing various movements within cultural criticism, summarizing the contributions of several major cultural critics including Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, Franz Fanon and Kobena Mercer. West argues that the decolonization of the third world along with the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 70s revealed the need for a new kind of cultural critic who could address issues of ethnic, sexual and gender diversity.

West goes on to focus in on the black diaspora and the criticism that emerged in response to it in order to outline the role of the new cultural critic. According to West “The modern black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness can be understood as the condition of relative lack of power for blacks to present themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes put forward by white supremacist ideologies” (17). West argues that in order to address these problems, the new cultural critic must demystify the power relations (including class, patriarchal and homophobic biases) in order to envision alternative ways to structure society. He calls this kind of demystificatory criticism “prophetic criticism,” for, he explains, “while it begins with social structural analyses it also makes explicit its moral and political aims” (20).

West explains that there are several challenges that the new cultural critic will face. According to West, demystificatory or prophetic critics must tread a fine line between reductionism (crude Marxisms, feminisms or radicalisms) and asceticism, or critical practices which lose touch with the specific historical and social context both of the artwork and of its reception (20). In addition, the new cultural critic—and especially critics of color—must learn to acquire the resources and cultural capital to succeed within racist and sexist academic institutions. According to West, the most effective strategy for surviving as a black cultural critic is neither to assimilate into dominant white mainstream nor to reject the mainstream altogether, but rather to be what West calls a “Critical Organic Catalyst,” someone who “stays attuned to the best of what the mainstream has to offer—its paradigms, viewpoints, and methods—yet maintains a grounding in affirming and enabling subcultures of criticism” (21-22).

West concludes by calling for the formation of solid and reliable alliances between white progressives and people of color: “The new kind of critic and artist associated with the new cultural politics of difference consists of an energetic breed of new world bricoleurs with improvisational and flexible sensibilities that sidestep mere opportunism and mindless eclecticism; persons of all countries, cultures, genders, sexual orientations, ages and regions, with protean identities…intellectual and political freedom fighters with partisan passion, [and] international perspectives” (23).

Paul, Dierdre Glenn. Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation: Womanist Thought and Perspective. Questions about the Purpose(s) of Colleges and Universities, Vol. 2. Ed. Norm Denzin, Josef Progler, Joe L. Kincheloe, and Shirley R. Steinberg. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

S. C. — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:07:57 +0000

“Through the processes of reflexivity and life history, Paul writes, “I attempt to cohere the concentric spheres of race, gender, and class as they play themselves out in my daily living and multiple roles” (xi). A collection of essays not necessarily meant to be read linearly, Life, Culture and Education on the Academic Plantation documents the author’s own social location as a Black woman in “a racially schizophrenic society, a single mother, a former public school teacher, a teacher educator, and an emerging intellectual” (xi). Just as Paul must live each day through multiple and contradictory roles, so too must the reader of this book encounter linguistic, formal, and narrative multiplicity: an “amalgam of genres and writing styles,” the book is written to promote “disequilibrium” (xii).

Chapter 1, “Opposition and the Valuation of Difference,” introduces the book as a whole and is a scholarly and yet personal assessment of inhabiting oppositional identity positionalities. In Chapter 2, “Young, Black, and Female in Academe,” Paul notes the personal difficulties she has faced as a Black female teacher and scholar, and yet defends her position as an academic, writing that “transformation can best be achieved by those who work from within to effect it” (9). Chapter 3, “Voice…Muted and Regained,” documents Paul’s struggle to harmonize her prior life experiences with her work as a scholar and a writer of these very essays. “The Perplexities of Black Scholarship,” Chapter 4, interrogates the way research is raced in the United States, and uses Paul’s experiential account of being arrested for protesting in order to conclude that perhaps
researchers from traditionally marginalized cultures study their communities in a more empathic and culturally sensitive fashion” (58). In her fifth chapter, “Toward Self-Definition of Black Maternal Epistemology,” Paul explores her role as a mother and notes that “we have so many lessons yet to learn about mother hood written from the perspective of Black mothers, from all stations in life” (68). “The Elective Auction Block” is Paul’s sixth chapter, and it describes the racist, damaging effects television can have and the way in which “Talk, text, and the presentation of racialized images impact public policy” (74). Chapter 7 is entitled “Rap and Orality: Critical Media Literacy, Pedagogy, and the Issue of Cultural Synchronization,” and it charts the author’s attempts to use rap as a pedagogical strategy, the ways this strategy does not lead to the “contrived epiphanies” described by popular films, and the ways this strategy was nonetheless pedagogically valuable (78). In Chapter 8, “‘Do Unto Others’ Schooling,” Paul looks at the role education plays in the disenfranchisement of people of color, and concludes with the concept of “liberatory pedagogy,” an educational philosophy that combines political praxis and “approaches Black subject matter and that involving people of color in an empathic and culturally sensitive fashion” in order to build coalitions and to theorize an anti-oppressive pedagogical education (99).

The book ends with a series of responses to Paul’s essays—responses that further the book’s “transformative agenda” by carrying on the conversation beyond the book’s more formal conclusion at the end of Chapter 8.

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