Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson

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СКАЧАТЬ Stella joined him on stage to play the drum, he noted that her decision to do so was somewhat controversial, since drum playing had traditionally been reserved for the men in his tribe. This change is hardly purely internal to Native American cultures; it takes place in response to contemporary American feminism. What we are historically is partly a function of what we did and said and what was done and said to and about us, along with how we responded to a host of other cultural representations. Groups define themselves in relation to other groups; their identity cannot be extricated from that comparative process. When identity is reinforced by a sense of group solidarity, that too remains relational. The textual history of a subculture typically embodies those negotiations. The students in our classes embody the current state of those opportunities and conflicts. There is little reason to hope we can change without acknowledging both that complex history and its current products.

      One aim of happy family multiculturalism is, of course, to maintain the status quo, to preserve as long as possible the present uneven distribution of wealth, prestige, and power. Hiding past and present inequities, injustices, and antagonisms decreases the chance that they will be redressed now or ever. That is the obvious dark side of Cheney’s histrionic sermonizing. But the briefs for happy family multiculturalism also speak to another kind of fear that is more mutually warranted and thus shared by some of those who would anthologize both multiculturalism’s inner triumphs and its outwardly directed antagonisms—the fear of a balkanized body politic. To bring forward either our targeted anger or our phantasmatic misrepresentations, it is feared, would only further polarize an already fragmented cultural terrain, making relations between groups still more antagonistic.

      Of course we have lived with intermittent cultural warfare across differently constituted lines of class, race, gender, and ethnicity throughout our history. And deep if still unstably articulated social antagonisms obviously remain with us today. Allowing for some notable exceptions, however, most groups seek at least temporary working alliances across battle lines when self-interest seems to argue for them. And few broadly multicultural anthologists are likely to view their enterprise as the first step in arming their constituencies for open warfare. Indeed, in a democratic society most of us need some vision of possible grounds for improved social relations to justify our present work; except for the far Right, few in a society not literally at war can adopt organized murder as a way of dealing with diversity.

      If we begin by taking a conflicted and substantially unjust present as a given, then, the question is how we might move to something better and how, in a minor way, an anthology might contribute to such a process. For the happy family folks the answer is simple—repress past and present antagonisms immediately. Indeed, they take such willed forgetfulness to be a condition for even entering into negotiations, and they would enforce those conditions with all the power available to them. Those groups that refuse to forget, say, a genocidal history and a present, at the very least, of lived inequities, are to be cast out of the social contract. Their family membership is canceled. In effect, the happy family multiculturalists have in mind an exclusionary and repressive body politic, despite their success at times in evoking a false and disingenuous liberalism based on an ideologically restricted inclusiveness. We have seen that kind of liberalism at work during the great purge of the Left in the 1950s and we know something of the monolithic right-wing culture to which it too readily capitulates. It is in fact not multiculturalism at all, but rather a monoculture in varied dress.

      Such confident solutions are not available to a multiculturalism that wishes to maintain both more full historical knowledge and a greater frankness about present tensions. Reading a multicultural anthology compiled with such aims can involve powerful moments of epiphanic identification across cultural differences; it can also produce moments when difference is treasured for the sense of partially irreducible variety that is one of its pleasures. A more fully multicultural anthology will also provoke moments of self-interrogation and historical anguish. Yet such multicultural anthologies give us more still than recovered pain and ecstasy within inviolable cultural boundaries. They give us workbooks of discourses for rearticulation, texts for comparison, contrast, and realignment. They give us a discursive space in which to compare histories and test possible filiations and alliances. Properly assembled, multicultural anthologies mix Utopian longings with a historical review of the fate such longings have often met in the past. They indicate some of the bases for strategic alliances across different cultures in the future, while giving voice to the forces that will resist and undermine those same alliances. They thus promote realism and vision in the context of historical reflection, empowering progressive work without simply reinforcing readers’ self-images.

      There is no way of assuring that readers will put anthologies to use in that fashion, just as there is no way of suturing a multicultural society in advance of its emergence. Much like individual texts, anthologies acquire different meanings in different contexts. Competing constituencies will construe their intertextual implications in diverse and contradictory ways. This is, to borrow a phrase Stuart Hall has put to good use, a multiculturalism “without guarantees.”⁵ That is the most we can ask for now, and it is better than the alternatives—misery, mayhem, and Republican right-wing extremism.

      In moving from anthologies to political reflection on multiculturalism we need to accept the fact that there can be no secure social text to hold in view, let alone any renegotiated social space whose character can be guaranteed in advance. Despite what the Right wants to believe, the future cannot be guaranteed; all we can do is to educate ourselves about our diverse cultural traditions and try to maximize good will, while recognizing that even those ground rules will not be universally valued. What can be guaranteed, however, is that multicultural negotiations carried on in ignorance of one another’s history and traditions will be permeated with bad faith. It is also probably inevitable that the social forms that can structure such negotiations will themselves change under pressure from competing and distinctive cultural traditions. While the Right has willfully conflated culture and society, maliciously implying thereby that cultural diversity necessarily threatens the existence of any consensually maintained social institutions, there is reason to assume that cultural differences will prompt changes that cut broadly across social life. Indeed, there is sound basis to conclude that has always been the case. There is no part of social life which can be wholly protected from cultural pressures. It may not be necessary, however, that the center hold, nor even that the spaces of recognized social articulation be conceived of as exclusively central, nor even that everyone suddenly be miraculously invested in caring about our intercultural exchanges. There has not been universal, continuous engagement in public life in the past, and there is no reason to suppose we can expect it in the future. Our “common” culture, moreover, has never been common in the sense of meaning the same thing to every constituency and subculture. Nor have its elements penetrated every area of cultural life nor penetrated it to the same degree. It may be sufficient to agree that there need to be such spaces, including institutions in which power is shared, contracts and meanings are negotiated, contact is maintained, and common enterprises are agreed upon. Such spaces include our public schools and our legislatures. Those are among the places capable of producing some level of multicultural exchange; we do not need to be identical with one another and we do not need to forget our history for those institutions to function. They may even function better if we refuse to repress the past.

3 RELATIVISM, POLITICS, AND ETHICS

WRITING LITERARY HISTORY IN THE SHADOW OF POSTSTRUCTURALISM

      How else could we entide that word “history,” now, except in speechmarks, under the sign of vocative instability, outside any assumed consensus? As perhaps the most over-employed item in the vocabulary of literary-critical and cultural analysis, “history” may well also be the least decisive. We return to history, work toward history, and espouse a historical method, but few of us can say exactly what we mean by history, except in the most gestural way. Those of us who worry about it at all find ourselves necessarily mired in complex theoretical retractions and modifications, bewildering enough to sponsor some fairly radical insecurities. Others, sensing a probable dead end street, run for the cover of the kind СКАЧАТЬ