Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson

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      Both here and in the second section of the book, therefore, I part company with John Guillory’s often persuasive Cultural Capital. Unlike Guillory, I believe the content of the curriculum matters a great deal and that changes in widely used texts can have significant social impact. I also think it matters what kinds of knowledge count as cultural capital and that when repressed or marginalized traditions achieve that status other changes may open up as a result. While canonical representation does not map directly onto social representation, the two are complexly related, and the wider nets cast by comprehensive anthologies can create powerful simulacra of social formations. That is not to diminish the importance of who has access to education but rather to grant equal importance to what they are taught. Here I take that issue up in relation to anthologies.

      The anthology as a single bound book, of course, has parallels with a similar structure that all college teachers assemble—the semester’s syllabus or reading list. The book has higher visibility and a wider audience, but the same issues of inclusion or exclusion obtain; in that sense, then, all teachers are anthologists. In both cases the priority placed on multicultural representation in the classroom helps persuade students about the priority of multicultural representation on the faculty and in the student body. The admissions policy embodied in the anthology makes an implicit comment on the admissions policy appropriate to the institution as a whole. Nor is it much of a leap to make a connection with the nation’s admission policy—its immigration statutes and their mixed and still politically contentious history of openness and racism in the 1990s. The problems of ethnic, racial, and gender representation in an anthology devoted to a nation’s history or its literature—anthologies that are common not only in the United States but in other countries as well—speak quite directly to questions about representation in public debate and in legislative bodies. Anthologies empower students to make these connections, whether or not teachers choose to make them explicit. As I began to argue in the previous chapter, these effects are part of the cultural work anthologies and curricula do even if we pretend they are not.

      Inclusion in an anthology is not equivalent to wielding effective political power, but neither are discursive and political representation in these different domains wholly discontinuous cultural processes. Literary and historical anthologies are not, to be sure, appropriate mechanisms for detailed social engineering; their use and impact is too unpredictable and their relation to detailed policy questions in other arenas entirely too oblique.² But their role in promoting core values that are exclusionary or inclusive, in valuing or devaluing minority and working-class cultures, in familiarizing readers with different traditions, and in imaging a multicultural body politic can be significant. The fact that anthologies and other educational practices cannot guarantee social change does not justify ignoring their role in promoting or discouraging it.

      The cultural power wielded by anthologies used by large numbers of secondary or college students should not, therefore, be underestimated. They succeed to a significant degree in representing not only the kind of society we have been but also the sort of society we are now and have the potential to become in the future. There is no escaping those effects; the option of simply collecting texts from the past in a neutral fashion does not exist. Every choice about what to include or exclude not only grants or denies those individual texts wide visibility but also puts each included text in a dialogue with the other texts in the anthology, a dialogue that gives readers a chance to test possible class or intercultural relations and a dialogue that would otherwise not take place. Anthologies figure not only the material facts of history but also the active process of remembering and reconstructing it. They offer a reading of past social relationships and put forward opportunities for new social relations in the future. Far more is at stake, therefore, than just the already significant power to propel a poem, story, or historical document from obscurity to renown, though that is obviously among an anthology’s powers as well, especially when a little-known small press publication thereby suddenly gains a much larger audience. But anthologies do not only have radical effects on texts. They also work to recreate their readers by repositioning them in relation to a remembered past, a lived present, and an imagined future. Anthologies are hardly the only force acting in that capacity, but they are not trivial, and they will, once again, have those effects whether their editors admit it or not.

      Editing an anthology of American literature is thus not only an aesthetic but also a social and political project. One must decide which racial, ethnic, and social groups to include, how much space to grant them, and whether to mix them up or group them together. A historical anthology can grant not only past but also present agency to various constituencies and political parties. One has to decide not only how such groups represent their own history but also how they represent other races, ethnicities, and political groups and indeed how they represent the nation’s various acts, ideals, and institutions. No past conversation recreated over such issues can fail to speak to the present. And nothing but the most benighted notion of evaluation would lead us to conclude that all these matters would be settled by judgments of quality or historical importance alone.³ For notions of quality change when different styles and forms of literary expression enter the picture, just as what counts as historically important changes when a focus on diplomatic, military, and dominant political history is broadened to include dissident groups and everyday life. Nor does the recognition that inclusion in anthologies can help to empower gendered, ethnic, racial, and political groups settle the problem of which sorts of texts get in and which stay out. The anthologist has to decide what sort of national history he or she wants us to remember and how the relations between different groups of people have helped shape that history. It is not merely a question of whether black or white or red or yellow perspectives matter, but rather a question about what sort of voices they will have within what is necessarily a very selective frame.

      An anthologist working with modern American poems must, for example, decide whether to limit the selection of Langston Hughes’s poems to his more humanistic affirmations of black identity, as most anthologists do, or to include his concise attacks on white racism and on Christian hypocrisy. Does one focus, like most anthologists, on Claude McKay’s most abstract protest poems or include the poems of explicit anguish about racial identity and rage at white America? In anthologizing the contemporary Mesquakie poet Ray Young Bear, do you include only his more affirmative poems focused on Native American culture, like “The Personification of a Name,” or pick more overtly troubled poems like “The Significance of a Water Animal” or “It Is the Fish-Faced Boy Who Struggles,” or even his towering poem of protest and indictment, “In Viewpoint: Poem for 14 Catfish and the Town of Tama, Iowa”? Does one ignore the many powerful poems protesting racism written by white Americans, instead anthologizing poems on less troubling topics? Does one include (or at least cite) some of the racist poems by major and minor white poets to show that poetry exemplified the same struggles typical of the rest of the culture or instead, again like most anthologists, allow readers to believe poets remained focused on more easily idealized subjects?

      The dominant pattern for many years for general anthologies of American literature has been to seek minority poems that can be read as affirming the poet’s culture but not mounting major challenges to white readers. One of Ray Young Bear’s most regularly anthologized poems, “Grandmother,” may seem not even to have been written by a Native American when it is taken out of the context of the rest of his work. It is also, to be sure, not just a question of the nature of the poem at issue but of our reading practices, interests, and assumptions and what interpretations they are most likely to produce. But that is something an anthologist can influence. Just how much of African American history seems to be invoked by Hughes’s widely anthologized “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” will depend in part on how much knowledge the reader brings to the poem and how much of that knowledge is put in play and amplified by the other poems in the anthology, especially other poems by Hughes himself. Simply placing “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human veins”) next to Hughes’s “The Bitter River” (“I’ve drunk of the bitter river . . . Mixed with the blood of the lynched boys”) will increase the СКАЧАТЬ