During the PC spasm last year I was talking regularly with friends on the board of this magazine, with colleagues at Wesleyan planning for cultural studies there, and with a group of left academics from colleges and universities in southern New England. We spent a good deal of time grousing about the assault on "political correctness" and multiculturalism, and trying to understand the phenomenon. What follows is an attempt to voice some of the exasperation we felt and sketch a "position" that was nowhere heard in the mainstream media. It came directly out of talks with my political friends, though of course I don't claim to speak for them. We lefties are not that keen for what often presents itself as multiculturalism. There is a version of it that takes the people of the world to be parceled out into cultures and subcultures, each self-contained and uniform, and each accessible only to its members--so that, for instance, only a Chicana would have the authority to teach about Chicana poetry. On the contrary, we think that all cultures are in continuous exchange with others, and that even the smallest societies are not homogeneous, but embrace their own hierarchies and conflicts. The search for purity is futile. Worse, it precludes learning about cultures from outside and certifies only the "other" as a source of knowledge about other cultures. It also tends to valorize raw experience as the only foundation of knowledge, and to forbid critique of cultures except from within. This sort of multiculturalism sees people as just intrinsically what they are--black lesbians, white male heterosexuals, and so on. Its essentialism is almost as disturbing to us as is the fatuous universalism of the right. On top of that, it leads to a politics of identity that makes any sort of embracing social movement against capitalist patriarchy hard indeed to imagine. The fact that multiculturalism has become a slogan of many college administrations and funding sources suggests how unthreatening it is to the holders of power, and how easy to contain and control in the guise of "diversity," not to mention its usefulness in training global corporate managers. Much about the PC phenomenon drives us up the ivied walls. Censorship, of course: we'll all take a loyalty oath to free speech. I pay dues to the American Civil Liberties Union and endorse most of its positions. And if it's OK for the Klan to speak on campus, it's surely OK for our National Association of Scholars colleagues to teach their classes (with unaccustomed responsibility for their ideas, of course). The few incidents of actual censorship, however, incidents recycled endlessly through the media, and those of egregious bad manners (with no censorship involved) that draw headlines like "Return of the Storm Troopers" (Wall Street Journal, April 10, 1991), are not what we mainly hold against PC, much as we deplore them. We object to PC because it is often a self-indulgent substitute for
{"title":"Political Correctness and the Obfuscation of Politics","authors":"Richard Ohmann","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.1040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.1040","url":null,"abstract":" During the PC spasm last year I was talking regularly with friends on the board of this magazine, with colleagues at Wesleyan planning for cultural studies there, and with a group of left academics from colleges and universities in southern New England. We spent a good deal of time grousing about the assault on \"political correctness\" and multiculturalism, and trying to understand the phenomenon. What follows is an attempt to voice some of the exasperation we felt and sketch a \"position\" that was nowhere heard in the mainstream media. It came directly out of talks with my political friends, though of course I don't claim to speak for them. We lefties are not that keen for what often presents itself as multiculturalism. There is a version of it that takes the people of the world to be parceled out into cultures and subcultures, each self-contained and uniform, and each accessible only to its members--so that, for instance, only a Chicana would have the authority to teach about Chicana poetry. On the contrary, we think that all cultures are in continuous exchange with others, and that even the smallest societies are not homogeneous, but embrace their own hierarchies and conflicts. The search for purity is futile. Worse, it precludes learning about cultures from outside and certifies only the \"other\" as a source of knowledge about other cultures. It also tends to valorize raw experience as the only foundation of knowledge, and to forbid critique of cultures except from within. This sort of multiculturalism sees people as just intrinsically what they are--black lesbians, white male heterosexuals, and so on. Its essentialism is almost as disturbing to us as is the fatuous universalism of the right. On top of that, it leads to a politics of identity that makes any sort of embracing social movement against capitalist patriarchy hard indeed to imagine. The fact that multiculturalism has become a slogan of many college administrations and funding sources suggests how unthreatening it is to the holders of power, and how easy to contain and control in the guise of \"diversity,\" not to mention its usefulness in training global corporate managers. \u0000 Much about the PC phenomenon drives us up the ivied walls. Censorship, of course: we'll all take a loyalty oath to free speech. I pay dues to the American Civil Liberties Union and endorse most of its positions. And if it's OK for the Klan to speak on campus, it's surely OK for our National Association of Scholars colleagues to teach their classes (with unaccustomed responsibility for their ideas, of course). The few incidents of actual censorship, however, incidents recycled endlessly through the media, and those of egregious bad manners (with no censorship involved) that draw headlines like \"Return of the Storm Troopers\" (Wall Street Journal, April 10, 1991), are not what we mainly hold against PC, much as we deplore them. We object to PC because it is often a self-indulgent substitute for ","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75653968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We find ourselves . . . in a vicious eddy of American economic history. Our fortunes as an occupational group have, for a hundred years, been closely bound to the evolution of industrial capitalism, for reasons I tried to analyze in English in America. Because our society expresses its values through the market, a sudden change in the market makes itself felt as a change in values. You can find in just about any of our professional publications now expressions of dismay that society does not seem to care about the humanities, about the full cultivation of the mind, about the higher literacy, about what we value most and are prepared to offer. Yet I doubt that American society, taken as a collection of individuals with personal values, holds literature or literacy any less dear in 1976 than in 1966. The point is that society determines our fortunes as a profession, not mainly through direct purchase of our services, but through the labor market where capitalists buy one or another kind of labor power. Right now they do not need nearly so much educated labor power as we, along with our colleagues in other fields, have been producing. This is the main fact about our present and future. The economic system is shaping our educational choices, and providing us the circumstances within which we will make our piece of history.
{"title":"English in America: The Next Twenty Years","authors":"Richard Ohmann","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.1034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.1034","url":null,"abstract":" We find ourselves . . . in a vicious eddy of American economic history. Our fortunes as an occupational group have, for a hundred years, been closely bound to the evolution of industrial capitalism, for reasons I tried to analyze in English in America. Because our society expresses its values through the market, a sudden change in the market makes itself felt as a change in values. You can find in just about any of our professional publications now expressions of dismay that society does not seem to care about the humanities, about the full cultivation of the mind, about the higher literacy, about what we value most and are prepared to offer. Yet I doubt that American society, taken as a collection of individuals with personal values, holds literature or literacy any less dear in 1976 than in 1966. The point is that society determines our fortunes as a profession, not mainly through direct purchase of our services, but through the labor market where capitalists buy one or another kind of labor power. Right now they do not need nearly so much educated labor power as we, along with our colleagues in other fields, have been producing. This is the main fact about our present and future. The economic system is shaping our educational choices, and providing us the circumstances within which we will make our piece of history.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84915969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The students make their way through the world with sensitive compasses and gyroscopes that tell them also which neighborhoods in Brooklyn are homelike to them and which parts of Boston; which places have nothing to do with their lives (e.g., Staten Island and Paterson); where are the places to go after college (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington); where they might spend summers; what styles and fashions signify; how to speak in what Basil Bernstein called the "elaborated code" of the middle class; how to place those who don't; how to avoid alienated labor by deploying credentials or creativity; and-- yes--whom to marry, should it come to such a pass. [...]most people don't so readily identify themselves by class as by gender or race, and perhaps don't even feel being working class or PMC the way they feel being white or male or straight or, especially, being Latino or black or female or gay--except of course when they are way out of their usual class habitat: a mechanic plunked down in the Century Club, say, or an English Professor at the Elks. [...]even such misadventures are not likely to endanger the displaced person, the way women and African Americans and gay men and others risk insult or violence in many venues. First generation college students, they had a big stake in believing anyone could make it in this country. [...]the ideology we take in with every breath has a lot to do with the many ways in which students at Wesleyan and at Middlesex Community College overlook or evade the hard reality of class.
{"title":"Is Class an Identity?","authors":"Richard Ohmann","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.1041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.1041","url":null,"abstract":" The students make their way through the world with sensitive compasses and gyroscopes that tell them also which neighborhoods in Brooklyn are homelike to them and which parts of Boston; which places have nothing to do with their lives (e.g., Staten Island and Paterson); where are the places to go after college (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington); where they might spend summers; what styles and fashions signify; how to speak in what Basil Bernstein called the \"elaborated code\" of the middle class; how to place those who don't; how to avoid alienated labor by deploying credentials or creativity; and-- yes--whom to marry, should it come to such a pass. [...]most people don't so readily identify themselves by class as by gender or race, and perhaps don't even feel being working class or PMC the way they feel being white or male or straight or, especially, being Latino or black or female or gay--except of course when they are way out of their usual class habitat: a mechanic plunked down in the Century Club, say, or an English Professor at the Elks. [...]even such misadventures are not likely to endanger the displaced person, the way women and African Americans and gay men and others risk insult or violence in many venues. First generation college students, they had a big stake in believing anyone could make it in this country. [...]the ideology we take in with every breath has a lot to do with the many ways in which students at Wesleyan and at Middlesex Community College overlook or evade the hard reality of class.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"13 6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83490118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines the expectations placed on black faculty to act as conduits of authentic blackness and black knowing even as they are undermined and undervalued in the classroom and other institutional settings. Paying special attention to the way that racial performance, engaged learning, and the role of the black instructor converge in the black studies classroom, I offer the black/weird as a framework (departure/positioning) from which students can engage in black/weird/play, a remedy that interrupts students’ desire for a particular hegemonic racial performance from black faculty while stimulating critical collective inquiry about black history, experience, culture, and the self. As black/weird/play engages possibility, pleasure, and play while taking cues from black nerd and black popular cultures, students learn to grapple with concepts, structures, subjecthood, and everything else, from the mundane to the fantastic, as they building knowledge and connections alongside and with black faculty who must constantly maneuver the already contested grounds of teaching while black.
{"title":"Weird/Black/Play: Turning Racial Authenticity and Professorial Performance on its Head in the Black Studies Classroom","authors":"W. Thompson","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.821","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the expectations placed on black faculty to act as conduits of authentic blackness and black knowing even as they are undermined and undervalued in the classroom and other institutional settings. Paying special attention to the way that racial performance, engaged learning, and the role of the black instructor converge in the black studies classroom, I offer the black/weird as a framework (departure/positioning) from which students can engage in black/weird/play, a remedy that interrupts students’ desire for a particular hegemonic racial performance from black faculty while stimulating critical collective inquiry about black history, experience, culture, and the self. As black/weird/play engages possibility, pleasure, and play while taking cues from black nerd and black popular cultures, students learn to grapple with concepts, structures, subjecthood, and everything else, from the mundane to the fantastic, as they building knowledge and connections alongside and with black faculty who must constantly maneuver the already contested grounds of teaching while black.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"49 1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89603903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the complexities and contradictions of neoliberal policy reforms on fifteen Black and Latino male community college students who participated in a qualitative, longitudinal study at Urban Community College. Though the conventional wisdom on community colleges assumes that more and better neoliberal policies will lead to improved outcomes and greater equity for educationally disenfranchised students, this study illustrates how the policies that are at the heart of the college completion agenda, such as continuous full-time enrollment, on-time graduation, and guided curricular pathways, were implicated in the study participants’ academic challenges.
{"title":"Speaking Back to the Neoliberal Community College","authors":"Emily Schnee","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.893","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the complexities and contradictions of neoliberal policy reforms on fifteen Black and Latino male community college students who participated in a qualitative, longitudinal study at Urban Community College. Though the conventional wisdom on community colleges assumes that more and better neoliberal policies will lead to improved outcomes and greater equity for educationally disenfranchised students, this study illustrates how the policies that are at the heart of the college completion agenda, such as continuous full-time enrollment, on-time graduation, and guided curricular pathways, were implicated in the study participants’ academic challenges.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"265 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72505886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This poem is part of a series using scientific concepts for messy (& glorious) human experiences; it is part of a recently completed manuscript STARFALL IN THE TEMPLE OF SAD GOODBYES. Prartho's bio: Prartho Sereno served as fourth Poet Laureate of Marin County, 2015—17. She has taught poem-making to children as a Poet in the Schools since 1999 and for over 12 years to adults at the College of Marin. Her four prizewinning poetry collections include Indian Rope Trick, Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and her illustrated collection, Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives and Loves of Kitchen Utensils.
{"title":"Chaos Theory","authors":"Prartho Sereno","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.997","url":null,"abstract":"This poem is part of a series using scientific concepts for messy (& glorious) human experiences; it is part of a recently completed manuscript STARFALL IN THE TEMPLE OF SAD GOODBYES. \u0000Prartho's bio: \u0000Prartho Sereno served as fourth Poet Laureate of Marin County, 2015—17. She has taught poem-making to children as a Poet in the Schools since 1999 and for over 12 years to adults at the College of Marin. Her four prizewinning poetry collections include Indian Rope Trick, Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and her illustrated collection, Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives and Loves of Kitchen Utensils.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"102 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84730244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Remote Australian schools face complex contextual issues due to systemic and enduring disadvantage. The structures and systems put in place to support and provide advantage for Indigenous Australians continually fail to meet their mark due to colonial structures, policies and inability to understand remote contextual demands. In South Australia, the context of this paper, systemic disadvantage disproportionately affects Indigenous people. This article explores the contemporary colonial landscape of a remote school context, provides background on the colonial institutions which shape the interactions and services provided to people in remote Australian areas, and provides two empirical examples of the contemporary, structural, and harmful influence of policy and political figures in a remote school. By examining the politics of being a school leader, the policy background for remote Australian schools, and the unique challenges of position both in policy and physical terms, we show how contemporary racism structures and conditions the lives of young people in remote contexts today.
{"title":"Systemic racism, a prime minister, and the remote Australian school system","authors":"Kate Cornelius, Aidan Cornelius-Bell","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.935","url":null,"abstract":"Remote Australian schools face complex contextual issues due to systemic and enduring disadvantage. The structures and systems put in place to support and provide advantage for Indigenous Australians continually fail to meet their mark due to colonial structures, policies and inability to understand remote contextual demands. In South Australia, the context of this paper, systemic disadvantage disproportionately affects Indigenous people. This article explores the contemporary colonial landscape of a remote school context, provides background on the colonial institutions which shape the interactions and services provided to people in remote Australian areas, and provides two empirical examples of the contemporary, structural, and harmful influence of policy and political figures in a remote school. By examining the politics of being a school leader, the policy background for remote Australian schools, and the unique challenges of position both in policy and physical terms, we show how contemporary racism structures and conditions the lives of young people in remote contexts today.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87543936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Images in film, paintings, sketches, and sculpture sometimes drive ideas home in ways that words on the page do not, prompting more visceral reactions and the desire to enact change instead of thinking about subjects on a more abstract level. This essay explores how the visual arts were used in a Fall 2020 course on Afrofuturist literature to supplement conventional readings, class discussions, and writing assignments, helping students to grasp many of the central principles of genre, such as re-visioning reality and undermining the “logics” established by colonial regimes, neo-colonial powers, and systemic racism; the ways that the past permeates the present; the possibilities of Africanist existence in a rich and productive future; how intersections of race, gender, and class influence artists' reconfigurations of artistic forms long dominated by White men. Several creative research projects, produced by students at the end of the semester, are described at length and analyzed to illustrate how they proccessed course concepts, and how Afrofuturist texts resonated in powerful ways during the COVID-19 pandemic.
{"title":"Visual Art and Fashion as Part of an English Department’s Afrofuturism Syllabus","authors":"G. Anatol","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.931","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.931","url":null,"abstract":"Images in film, paintings, sketches, and sculpture sometimes drive ideas home in ways that words on the page do not, prompting more visceral reactions and the desire to enact change instead of thinking about subjects on a more abstract level. This essay explores how the visual arts were used in a Fall 2020 course on Afrofuturist literature to supplement conventional readings, class discussions, and writing assignments, helping students to grasp many of the central principles of genre, such as re-visioning reality and undermining the “logics” established by colonial regimes, neo-colonial powers, and systemic racism; the ways that the past permeates the present; the possibilities of Africanist existence in a rich and productive future; how intersections of race, gender, and class influence artists' reconfigurations of artistic forms long dominated by White men. Several creative research projects, produced by students at the end of the semester, are described at length and analyzed to illustrate how they proccessed course concepts, and how Afrofuturist texts resonated in powerful ways during the COVID-19 pandemic.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"67 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76611566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
"Time-Sensitive: Teaching Afrofuturism Through the Nineteenth Century" describes a strategy of teaching Afrofuturism that exposes its long and ongoing history. Borrowing from Tavia Nyong'o's anarchaeological historical methodologies, this essay argues that teaching literary history in a non-linear way disrupts students' sense that they exist outside of--that is, at the end of--historical time, inviting students to see themselves as acting within a yet-uncertain, always-developing future and linking in-class instruction to political praxis.
{"title":"Time-Sensitive: Teaching Afrofuturism Through the Nineteenth Century","authors":"Dalia Davoudi","doi":"10.5195/rt.2022.1006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2022.1006","url":null,"abstract":"\"Time-Sensitive: Teaching Afrofuturism Through the Nineteenth Century\" describes a strategy of teaching Afrofuturism that exposes its long and ongoing history. Borrowing from Tavia Nyong'o's anarchaeological historical methodologies, this essay argues that teaching literary history in a non-linear way disrupts students' sense that they exist outside of--that is, at the end of--historical time, inviting students to see themselves as acting within a yet-uncertain, always-developing future and linking in-class instruction to political praxis.","PeriodicalId":42678,"journal":{"name":"Radical Teacher","volume":"173 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79530347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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