Border Crossings

Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education

Henry A. Giroux

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135928988
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Didattica generale

The concept of border and border crossing has important implications for how we theorize cultural politics, power, ideology, pedagogy and critical intellectual work. This completely revised and updated edition takes these areas and draws new connections between postmodernism, feminism, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Highly relevant to the times which we currently live, Giroux reflects on the limits and possibilities of border crossings in the twenty-first century and argues that in the post-9/11 world, borders have not been collapsing but vigorously rebuilt. The author identifies the most pressing issues facing critical educators at the turn of the century and discusses topics such as the struggle over the academic canon; the role of popular culture in the curriculum; and the cultural war the New Right has waged on schools. New sections deal with militarization in public spaces, empire building, and the cultural politics of neoliberalism. Those interested in cultural studies, critical race theory, education, sociology and speech communication will find this a valuable source of information.

I

Schooling and Cultural Politics

1

Postcolonial Ruptures/ Democratic Possibilities
The choice of language and the use to which it is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.^1

I begin this chapter with a quote from Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, an African writer who is in the forefront of postcolonial struggles to redefine meaning as a historical and social construction. At stake here is not merely the refusal to take language for granted but to understand how it is produced and rewritten within the ideological and material legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Hence, it is in the domain of language that the traces of a theoretical and political journey begin to emerge as part of a broader attempt to engage meaning as a form of social memory, social institutions as powerful carriers and legitimators of meaning, and social practices as sites in which meaning is re-invented in the body, desire, and in the relations between the self and others.

Language in all of its complexity becomes central not only in the production of meaning and social identities but also as a constitutive condition for human agency. For it is in language that human beings are inscribed and give form to those modes of address that constitute their sense of the political, ethical, economic, and social.

This book is about what is often called the crises in meaning and authority that have beset many of the Western democracies in the 1990s. Of course, any one crisis can be refigured to secure the authority of a specific ideological position. My interest is not to secure the authority of a totalizing narrative that enshrines truth as a science and agency as a universalizing category. Rather I attempt to challenge the authority and discourses of those practices wedded to the legacy of a colonialism that either directly constructs or is implicated in social relations that keep privilege and oppression alive as active constituting forces of daily life within the centers and margins of power. Within the currency of the language of cultural crisis and authority, postcolonial discourses have pushed against the politics of such crises by inserting the primacy of a politics of difference and struggle. They scan the surface language that constructs such crises and ask: which crisis, for whom is there a crisis, and who speaks in the name of such a crisis? “How do we construct a discourse, which displaces the effects of the colonizing gaze while we are still under its influence?”²Postcolonialism challenges how imperial centers of power construct themselves through the discourse of master narratives and totalizing systems; they contest monolithic authority wielded through representations of “brute institutional relations” and the claims of universality. Postcolonial theorists offer resistance to social practices that relegate otherness to the margins of power; they interrogate how centers of power and privilege are implicated in their own politics of location as forms of imperializing appropriation; and, of crucial importance, postcolonialism contests the dominant Eurocentric writing of politics, theory, and history. In effect, postcolonial discourses have not only redefined a new cultural politics of difference, they have also helped to create a new amalgam of cultural workers whose distinctive features are, according to Cornel West:

to trash the monolithic and homogenous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing . . . what makes these [gestures] novel—along with the cultural politics they produce—is how and what constitutes difference, the weight and gravity it is given in representation, and the way in which highlighting issues like exterminism, empire, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nation, nature, and region at this historical moment acknowledges some of the discontinuity and disruption from previous forms of cultural critique.³

Postcolonial discourses have also made clear that the old legacies of the political left, center, and right can no longer be so easily defined. Indeed, postcolonial theorists have gone further and provided important insights into how such discourses either actively construct colonial relations or are implicated in their construction. From this perspective, Robert Young argues that postcolonialism is a dislocating discourse that raises theoretical questions regarding how dominant and radical theories “have themselves been implicated in the long history of European colonialism—and, above all, the extent to which [they] continue to determine both the institutional conditions of knowledge as well as the terms of contemporary institutional practices—practices which extend beyond the limits of the academic institution.”⁴ This is especially true for many of the new social movements that have taken up the language of difference and a concern with the politics of the other. Many theorists within these movements have addressed a number of pressing political and pedagogical issues through the construction of binary oppositions that represent both a new vanguardism while simultaneously falling into the trap of simply reversing the old colonial legacy and problematic of oppressed vs. oppressor. In doing so, they have often unwittingly imitated the colonial model of erasing the complexity, complicity, diverse agents, and multiple situations that constitute the enclaves of colonial/hegemonic discourse and practice.⁵

In this chapter, and throughout this book, I will argue that postcolonial theory, in its many varieties, provides the possibility of both challenging and transforming a cultural politics formed in binary oppositions that both silence and invite people to deskill themselves as educators and cultural workers. The challenge that postcolonialism presents to educators and cultural workers calls for new ideas, pedagogical strategies, and social movements capable of constructing a politics of difference within critical public cultures forged in the struggle to deepen and extend the promise of radical and cultural democracy. This suggests a politics and pedagogy developed around new languages capable of acknowledging the multiple, contradictory, and complex subject positions people occupy within different social, cultural, and economic locations. At issue here is a challenge to the growing anti-intellectualism and theoretical reductionism that have become characteristic of so much critical educational theory within the last decade.

Central to this book is the need to take up the relationship between language and the issues of knowledge and power on the one hand, and to retheorize language within a broader politics of democracy, culture, and pedagogy on the other. This suggests creating a new language that extends the meaning of pedagogy as a form of cultural production that takes place in a variety of sites and is produced by a diverse number of cultural workers. It also proposes appropriating some of the most insightful aspects of postcolonial discourse to further our understanding of the limits and possibilities of what it means to recognize that every new paradigm has to create its own language because the old paradigms, through their use of particular language forms, produce knowledge and social relations that often serve to legitimate specific relations of power. Oppositional paradigms provide new languages through which it becomes possible to deconstruct and challenge dominant relations of power and knowledge legitimated in traditional forms of discourse. These oppositional paradigms offer the possibility for producing constructive languages that provide the opportunity for educators to understand and engage the experiences of both the classroom and other cultural sites. This opposition often reflects major changes in thinking that are mediated and produced through related shifts in new ways of speaking and writing. Oppositional languages are generally unfamiliar, provoking questions and pointing to social relations that will often appear alien and strange to many educators (what Roger Simon calls the fear of theory). What is at stake here is whether such languages offer a vision and practice for new forms of understanding, social practice, and collective struggle.

In this book, I argue that the varied discourses of postmodernism, feminism, modernism and postcolonialism provide diverse but theoretically provocative and valuable insights for educators and cultural workers to construct an oppositional and transformative politics. A dialogical encounter between these discourses offers cultural workers the opportunity to reexamine the partiality of their respective views. Similarly, such an encounter points to new possibilities for sharing and integrating the best insights of these varied discourses as part of a broader radical democratic project. In effect, this is a call for educators and cultural workers to become border crossers engaged in an effort to create alternative public spheres. In my mind, alternative public spheres are central not only for creating the conditions for “the formation and enactment of social identities,” but also for enabling the conditions “in which social equality and cultural diversity coexist with participatory democracy.”⁶ It is through the development of such public spheres that the discourses of democracy and freedom can address what it means to educate students for forms of citizenship forged in a politics of difference that educate people in the Gramscian sense of governing as agents who can locate themselves in history, while simultaneously shaping the present as part of a discourse and practice that allow people to imagine and desire beyond society’s existing limitations and practices.

A caveat must be noted here. To appropriate the discourses of postcolonialism, modernism, postmodernism, and feminism is not another academic attempt to construct new topologies, nor is it meant to suggest a textual encounter based on a refusal of politics. On the contrary, I am taking a subject position, a point of view that argues that without a political project, there can be no ground on which to engage questions of power, domination, human suffering, and the possibilities of human struggle. In this case, I embrace a point of view rooted in a discourse of emancipation that recognizes that subjective and objective forms of domination need to be addressed as part of an educational project that is the starting point for political engagement. Hence, the varied theoretical positions critically appropriated in this book become important to the degree that they provide the categories and theoretical practice by which to engage in forms of transgression that challenge knowledge and social relations structured in dominance. This suggests a political project that goes beyond merely discursive struggles, one that also attempts to transform nondiscursive and institutional relations of power by connecting educational struggles with broader struggles for the democratization, pluralization, and reconstruction of public life.

In what follows, I want to briefly analyze some of the central theoretical assumptions that characterize the diverse work of a number of postcolonial theorists.⁷ In doing so, I want to critically appropriate these assumptions as part of an effort to both enter into dialogue with this body of work and also engage its criticisms as part of an attempt to challenge some of the primary categories that construct current forms of radical educational theory and practice (including my own work). At the same time, I want to use some of the central insights of postcolonial theories to problematize and extend the possibilities that have emerged within the complex and sometimes contradictory discourses of modernism, feminism, and postmodernism. Finally, I want to define the central theoretical categories around which I develop the notions of border crossing and border pedagogy as forms of cultural politics.

Colonizing Language and the Politics of Reversals

Must we always polarize in order to polemicize? Are we trapped in a politics of struggle where the representation of social antagonisms and historical contradictions can take no other form than a binarism of theory vs. politics? Can the aim of freedom or knowledge be the simple inversion of the relation of oppressor and oppressed, margin and periphery, negative image and positive image? Is our only way out of such dualism the espousal of an implacable oppositionality or the invention of an originary counter-myth of radical purity? Must the project of our liberationist aesthetics be forever part of a totalizing, Utopian vision of Being and History that seeks to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences that constitute the very structure of human subjectivity and its systems of cultural representations?⁸

The logic of binary oppositions appears to have become an obsessive fatal attraction. More obviously, this is true for neoconservatives who consistently attempt to maintain imperial control over the Other through categories of discourse developed in repressive totalities and exclusions. For many neoconservatives, the issues of complexity, absence, difference, and specificity constitute a threat to monumentalism, cultural homogeneity, and master narratives that maintain the varied dimensions of Eurocentricism. This is evident in the current debates within the United States regarding the politics, content, and use of the academic canon. Neoconservatives such as members of the National Association of Scholars see these debates as less of an expression of academic freedom than as a threat to the very nature of Western civilization. The attack on a politics of cultural difference is also evident in the struggles being waged by the English First movement, which is indicative of the emerging new nativism that has gained credibility in the Reagan-Bush Era. The opposition to cultural democracy is further evident in the numerous attacks on radical approaches to multiculturalism that display a renewed interest in forms of democracy that challenge the violence of racism, bigotry, and cultural chauvinism.⁹

But the violence of master narratives formed in th...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Schooling and Cultural Politics
• Postcolonial Ruptures/Democratic Possibilities
• Crossing the Boundaries of Educational Discourse Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism
• Redefining the Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity Beyond the Politics of Pluralism
• Cultural Workers and Cultural Pedagogy
• Critical Pedagogy and Cultural Power An Interview with Henry A. Giroux*
• Cultural Studies, Resisting Difference, and the Return of Critical Pedagogy
• Popular Culture as a Pedagogy of Pleasure and Meaning Decolonizing the Body*
• Neoliberalism and the Militarization of Public Space
• Interview Politics of Radical Pedagogy*
• Challenging Neoliberalism's New World Order The Promise of Critical Pedagogy*
• Education after Abu Ghraib Revisiting Adorno's Politics of Education1
• Index