An instructor and her student offer complementary perspectives on what happened in a classroom in which reading Toni Morrison opened up nearly intractable resistances to a making and sharing of knowledge in which no one was allowed to take refuge in what Catherine Fox calls “whiteliness” and assume a position outside of others’ knowing while asking those same others to assume the “burden of representation.” Complicating our notion of progressive pedagogy and our assumption that we know what progress looks like, the article suggests, in Jones’s words, “both education’s gifts and its limitations.

Surveying the current state of our “plural and dynamic multiculturalisms” and directing attention to valuable resources in anthologies and criticism, the author suggests that multicultural studies might now focus more on resistance and creativity in the face of oppression than on oppression itself; more on the multiple intersections and interactions of different groups, positions, and experiences than on single (sometimes essentialized) groups; and more on existing power relations and social inequities, and the structural nature of racism and oppression, than on individual behavior.

An instructor and her student offer complementary perspectives on what happened in a classroom in which reading Toni Morrison opened up nearly intractable resistances to a making and sharing of knowledge in which no one was allowed to take refuge in what Catherine Fox calls “whiteliness” and assume a position outside of others’ knowing while asking those same others to assume the “burden of representation.” Complicating our notion of progressive pedagogy and our assumption that we know what progress looks like, the article suggests, in Jones’s words, “both education’s gifts and its limitations.”

I 'm glad we don't know whether Chaucer raped one of my brightest students exclaimed, because if he did, I couldn't like And I want to like him if I'm going to read him. The student was responding to my lesson on Chaucer's biography. Within the scope of my upper-level undergraduate Chaucer course, I include pertinent information about his participation in fourteenth-century English social and political life, and I thought it worthwhile to mention that, according to court documents, Cecily Chaumpaigne in 1380 released Geoffrey Chaucer from omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo tam [sic] de aliqua alia re velcausa-'actions of whatever kind either concerning my rape or any other matter' (Howard 317). I explained to the class that no certain interpretation of this inscrutable event exists. Because raptus could refer to either a kidnapping or a rape, medievalists can do little more than conjecture about the events that transpired between Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne.' My student seized this ambiguity and therein found sufficient wiggle room in her reaction to Chaucer that she could continue to enjoy his literature without having to commit herself to liking the works of a rapist. For her, the potential ethical ramifications of aligning a personal affection for Chaucer and his literature with her contemporary social and political beliefs were alleviated by a welcome gap in historical knowledge. As happens so frequently in the classroom, we moved beyond this moment, but my student's words stuck with me uncomfortably. What if Chaucer had indeed been a rapist? How would I encourage my students to negotiate the difficult readerly terrain of enjoying great literature written by bad people? Other literature professors face similar uncomfortable moments with, for example, Malory's rape, Spenser's violent diatribes against the Irish, Byron's incest, Yeats's and Pound's Fascist sympa-

The author considers cases of literary figures whose ethics might make readers uncomfortable—Geoffrey Chaucer’s possible rape of a young woman, Flannery O’Connor’s possible racism—and argues that, even though postmodernism has “killed” the author as an object of critical inquiry, careful attention to questions of authorial and readerly ethics can still play an important role in both our students’ development as critical and engaged readers and our own.

Describing a service-learning project in Chicago public housing, the author argues for a reconception of counterpublics that takes the individual (and individual development) as the primary unit of analysis. The real question for service-learning educators, he suggests, is not whether the private and the public can inform each other, but whether we are prepared to discern the ways in which they already do inform each other in the communities we wish to serve. The students in the project developed a much broader conception of themselves as members of the human family, with the consequence that, although social problems in public housing were not changed, public discourse and private convictions about race in those communities were altered, suggesting that cultural difference may be less of a problem and more of a resource in service learning courses.

Recognizing that critical thinking is enhanced by an engagement with diversity, the author illustrates how race can usefully be addressed in a predominantly white classroom through a local pedagogy that respects and addresses the complexities of students’ often contradictory experiences of race, rather than essentializing whiteness or identifying it only with white privilege.

The essay argues that the homophobia that persists in some leftist thinking results in an impoverished and undialectical understanding of class and class consciousness. Through attention to works by John Rechy and James Baldwin, the author illustrate that categories of oppression such as class, gender, sexual orientation, and race cannot be used as analogies of one another but rather are mutually imbricated and mutually constitutive.

Challenging views of working-class white students that either displace all white racism onto them or, at best, see them as having exchanged class consciousness for race privilege, the author argues for a critical race pedagogy that includes a more complex image of poor and working-class whites. She argues for both deconstructive pedagogies that can expose the role of language in maintaining racist and classist structures and reconstructive pedagogies that can provide students with the rhetorical tools for employing language transformatively.

“As if the problem of racism outside of the academy isn’t enough,” the author says, “try thinking about the ways it has informed the very notion of academy and maintains a presence in our academic institutions.” He reflects on his own position in the academy as racialized subject, educand, and educator, departing from Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of an “autoethnography” to engage in a “selfiography,” in the process interrogating not only notions of “blackness” but also the too-often-naturalized assumptions of whiteness.

Tracing her own efforts to assert her Cherokee ancestry, the author considers what is at stake for the more than four million mixed-bloods in the United States and suggests that individual nations must find some way to acknowledge those who wish to claim their heritage. She argues that finding a way to accept unenrolled mixed-blood peoples will allow indigenous nations to accrue greater political and cultural power in this country.

Looking at arguments put forth by courts, the State of Hawai‘i, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists, as well as constructions of Hawaiianness by Native Hawaiians and Locals on the mainland, the author analyzes a rhetorical shift from celebrations of cultural identity to assertions of nationhood and sovereignty on the part of Native Hawaiians that has at times made nonnative Locals feel displaced in the only “home” they have known. Both groups have had to deal with a legacy of U.S. imperialism and injustice, placing them at times in coalition to confront racism and at times in conflict.

The author argues that constructions of literacy that suppress or omit nonverbal elements such as the visual and the tactile are limiting students’ potential. She traces the way the historical relationship between image and word has consistently privileged language, and offers instances from her experience with students and with her own children to argue for a more reciprocal dynamic and a polymorphic literacy that can increase the scope and power of our literacy and our literacy teaching.

This essay focuses on the grammar–rhetoric–composition program at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco, a sixteenth–century institution of higher education in Mexico, to argue for a more amply conceived set of colonialist beginnings for American composition. As an emergent site for North American composition–rhetoric, Tlaltelolco launched phenomena familiar to contemporary scholarship, for example composition-rhetoric as attractor for public debates about race and class, as sponsor of debased curricula for people of color, and as re–enforcer of linkages among color, class, aptitude, and local discourse practices.

Investigates how disability is discovered, constructed, and performed in a certain type of cultural practice, that is, in a postmodern, undergraduate college classroom. Argues that the implementation of an autobiographical pedagogy must extend beyond the dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality and must include disabled persons in these discussions as well.

Children growing up in Hawaii, coming as they do in their plasticyears under the influence of the public school, preparing themfor the assumption of the responsibilities which life in Hawaii demands, should come tofeel that, in cutting cane on the plantation, in driving a tractor in the fields, in swinging a sledge in a blacksmith shop, in wielding a brush on building or fence or bridge, as well as in sitting at a doctors or merchants or manager' or banker' desk, there is opportunity for rendering a necessary as well as intelligent, worthy, and creative service. -United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1920 (4)

Discusses the first comprehensive examination of the system of public education in Hawai‘i, conducted in 1920. Notes the great importance of the study since it not only evaluated Hawaii‘s educational system but also provided the territorial government some gauge of Hawaii‘s status as a United States territory and its success in meeting the ideals of America.

Describes the experiences of the author as she tries to transfigure her students enrolled in freshman writing and college preparatory writing classes at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon (located in the “dry side” of the state). Addresses students' racism, homophobia, and distrust of their own skills in writing.

Teaching, like politics, can be considered to be the “art of repetition.” But teaching, again like politics, is also capable of enlarging our political views by challenging current arguments or by examining the limitations of the argument. The four books reviews here, which examine race, culture, and sexuality, are poised to inform the politics of their readers, but find themselves bound by the problem of political mantras. Says Stockton: “Never have so few propositions been repeated by so many in such a shore time over such a broad range.” Although not without merit, all four books struggle with politicized texts that have all been done before.

Preview this article: Comment & Response: A Comment on "Reading 'Whiteness' in English Studies", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/63/5/collegeenglish1227-1.gif

Considers the role of the “white ground” in English studies at a critical period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the discipline, along with the rest of the academy and country, struggled mightily with issues of race. Describes the author’s interest in constructing a narrative about the relationships between discourse and identity with students.

Offers a reading of “The Music Man” that traces the ways its charm and humor are undergirded by a parodic stance toward American values as rooted in turn-of-the-century discourses of literacy, education, morality, and in the simultaneously burgeoning national obsessing with buying and selling. Considers sexual and textual anxieties in the Progressive Era, “the repressed/repressive librarian,” and consumerist rhetoric.

Examines representatives of the story cycle genre--Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine” and Gloria Naylor’s “The Women of Brewster Place.” Examines a revisionary episode from each text to situate story cycles in a frame that embraces both Western and non-Western traditions. Suggests that scholars, teachers, and students see and celebrate the diverse realities of spirituality, magic, and communal memory.Examines representatives of the story cycle genre--Louise Erdrich’s "Love Medicine" and Gloria Naylor’s "The Women of Brewster Place." Examines a revisionary episode from each text to situate story cycles in a frame that embraces both Western and non-Western traditions. Suggests that scholars, teachers, and students see and celebrate the diverse realities of spirituality, magic, and communal memory.

Examines the workings of an insistent political logic in Ralph Ellison’s novel. Traces the novelistic operations, specifically the uses of symbolism, that allow Ellison to substitute rhetoric for reference, myth for history. Tests out some of the generalizing claims about Communism this technique enables Ellison to make. Argues that he chose highly anomalous details to practice typification.

Preview this article: The Nigger Huck: Race, Identity, and the Teaching of Huckleberry Finn, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/57/8/collegeenglish9084-1.gif

Preview this article: Interrogating "Whiteness," (De)Constructing "Race", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/57/8/collegeenglish9083-1.gif