'Ethnic' Women Writers

PART 2 OF 2

thanks to regina, who wrote:

>In sociology and anthropology, we would say that ethnicity is a shared
>cultural heritage, or sense of sharing a common heritage, identity, and
>destiny with others of one's ethnic group that is different from the
>cultural mainstream.

and

>By the above definition, there are plenty of white ethnics in America -- but
>there are also presumably whites who are not ethnic.  [....]  There are
>always a significant number of white students,
>but never the entire class, who report that they *have no* particular sense
>of an ethnic identity.  They feel like just plain, generic "American white
>folks."

and so

>Does everyone therefore have an ethnicity?

yes, this is all helpful:  institutionally, i would imagine the key
question here is, how do we help non-ethnic (ie, fully mainstreamed
"American white folks") students understand that some people with shared
cultural practices have access to power, and some people with same do not
have access to power?  and what is this thing we call power and how does it
operate, and do we just want people all to have access to "power" as it now
exists, or do we want to revise social organization to eliminate power
systems that operate via hierarchy and exclusion?

which is to say that in *literature*, we tend to Understand As Art and
valorize artifacts that were generated by regina's
mainstream-ethnicity-that-is-not-one -- so in teaching literature, whether
mainstreamed or marginalized, what we're really teaching is What We Read
And Why (ie, canon formation).  which is to say that the study of
literature is very much the study of contemporary power systems -- of which
authors are "good" and why that is, of how people use language and why, and
of how language practices are "read."

so i think it's fair to say that, perhaps unlike regina's discipline, an
ethnic lit course is not about presenting a series of artifacts and
establishing simply that "these authors share a cultural approach to art
and language."  that can be part of it, but what more typically tends to
happen is that a series of *cross*-ethnicity (cross-racial, actually)
artifacts leave (mainly privileged) students observing that "what's the
matter with all of these writers that they all complain about being
alienated."  perhaps one of the many dangers of lumping a variety of
non-mainstream literatures into one course (introductory survey though it
may be) is that student readers learn less about those shared cultural
practices, and more about the way various "ethnicities" (really races)
*seem* to share a lumped heritage of not-belonging.  which perhaps
*suggests* a unity of concern between, say, african american and native
american authors -- when in truth these peoples often differ vastly in
their goals, experiences, and language practices.

help.

believe me, it's not my goal to eliminate courses in non-dominant
literatures.  but the title "ethnic," as pertains to literary studies, is
clearly a lie, and the current curricular position of these courses
relative to the curriculum as a whole actually works to create a
problematic which then cannot easily be problematized.  (hell, if we want
to get disciplinary about it, science doesn't even recognize "race" as
*existing*, per se.)  some students do "get it," do grasp the institutional
power issues at stake, but a majority seem bogged down in
anti-intellectually diversive, faux issues that often go something like
"stop calling me racist."  and it seems to me that the curricular
*positioning* of the course *encourages* them to stay stuck there.

thanks for the help,

kass


~~~~~~~~~

kass.fleisher  @  colorado.edu
links to online publications available at:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~fleisher

Kass --

It sounds like you already have a pretty firm grasp on what you want to do
in the course.  Why not start with a discussion of the nature of ethnicity,
perhaps a short social science piece -- then move to the point that the
really central issue is power being differentially distributed by ethnicity,
so that "generic white folks" writing becomes literature per se --
"hegemonic discourse" if you will -- then to the point that what this course
is about is examining non-hegemonic writings -- then to the literature, all
the while having the students examine it for the shared "outsider" voice, as
well as the particulars of cultural/ethnic tradition that can be discerned.
This is probably pretty much what you're already doing anyway -- why is it
not OK?  If the problem is wanting to include ethnic voices that are not "of
color," why not just go ahead and do so?

  -- Gina

    Kass amd Regina complicate the problem of teaching an ethnic lit course
in interesting ways.
    They point out that we're dealing with institutionalized definitions of
ethnicity - created not only by universities, but other institutions, too -
and with disciplines' definition, i.e, we're disciplined to teach within a
certain framework and we get to know the rewards for complying and
penalities for being undisciplined. If the definitons distort reality, as
they do, what to do?
    The complaints that 'ethnic' in a course title avoids consideration of
race is justified if the course practices that avoidance. (Who decides the
title? It may have been chosen some time ago by faculty with not enuf
thought it stuck because it's troublesome to get titles changed or chosen to
avoid institutional fever.) Should we use 'race' by itself? I think it's
Patricia Collins in 'Black Feminist Thought' who points out that this makes
the reference to biology and ignores culture. Supported my term,
'race/ethnic, I think. We're all raced. The students who think of themselves
as generic 'white Americans' appear to agree.
    I've been under the impression that a lit course is supposed to include
reading for subtexts. Isn't that the reason for teaching the work of what
some refer to of DEMs (dead European males)? to learn who heroes are, what
values to appreciate? I don't teach literature, but that was the point of
the lit professor who team-taught a Women's Studies course with me. Reading
a Henry James story , e.g., uncovered sexuality issues; that not all
students read it the same way was a subject of discussion. And she
introduced us to essays by Anya Loomba, in India, who shows how studying
Shakespeare in Indian colleges (undergraduate) helps students absorb gender,
race and class values of the English aristocracy.  (I should note this was a
grad course in New York City)
    From this perspective it makes perfect sense that Kass adds race and
class to her intro ethnic lit course. Toni Morrison's 'Playing in the Dark'
is a powerful little book on race and gender in U.S.A. literature (omits
class). How great that you have days, Kass, when you teach self-critique and
responsibility.
    Overcoming students' resistance to race, class and sexuality is tough
(to gender, too). Would it help to approach it something like this: asking
students the identity along these lines of  one or more of the characters,
then how they know and then whether the story would work if the identity
were other?
    Students' claim to be each an individual, thus there is diversity is a
familiar  ideology. Yes, it's not being different that matters; it's the
power differential.
    Perhaps a useful concept to introduce would be 'coerced identity.' I've
found it useful in my own thinking since I read it as a title in an essay by
Amrita Chhachi in India. She discusses the pressures on Muslims, the
minority there, to draw together across diverse beliefs, practices and
classes under the pressure of the majority, dominant group, Hindus, and
attacks on Muslims. The focal point is religion, but it seems to me to apply
to other socially constructed groups, too. Any one of them can be used as a
basis for exercising power over others. Then those others draw together -
some uneasily, unwillingly.
                        - beatrice
bkachuck.cuny  @  prodigy.net

beatrice wrote:

>    Perhaps a useful concept to introduce would be 'coerced identity.' I've
>found it useful in my own thinking since I read it as a title in an essay by
>Amrita Chhachi in India. She discusses the pressures on Muslims, the
>minority there, to draw together across diverse beliefs, practices and
>classes under the pressure of the majority, dominant group, Hindus, and
>attacks on Muslims. The focal point is religion, but it seems to me to apply
>to other socially constructed groups, too. Any one of them can be used as a
>basis for exercising power over others. Then those others draw together -
>some uneasily, unwillingly.

this is useful, thanks for this, and i'd like to add that i have often
joked that teaching these courses is actually about teaching conflict
management -- what we do/should do when confronted with different opinions
and practices -- especially the sorts of opinions we find fundamentally and
personally threatening to us (like when a student of color informs the
class that "all whites are racist").  in this way the class becomes a study
in heterology -- i don't try to get freshmen to read certeau, but i can
boil down the ideas there (which i perhaps barely understand myself) and
enact a study of how we define Other and who among us how power to enforce
those definitions (and how that enforcement happens)....

and by way of doing so -- well, you'll laugh, but i've tried everything,
including a "talking ball" (i couldn't use a talking stick with a class of
35 -- someone could get hurt!) that *for alert students* reveals that
speaking -- holding the ball and speaking while all others must listen --
is itself a capital that *some* groups feel more entitled to "hog" than
others....  (side note:  it's very interesting to watch women and students
of color *voluntarily* give the ball *back* to white male ball hogs....)  i
also use marriage counseling tricks like the one where speaker A gets to
talk, and speaker B can talk next but not until she has recited what
speaker A just *said*, and received *approval* from speaker A that what she
*thinks* speaker A said *is* what speaker A *did* say (or mean to say)....

i know, you're exhausted already...but this last exercise was stunning in
its revelations of how some groups of speakers 1) had no interest in
reciting what had been "heard"; and 2) how erroneous that hearing *was*....
again, *alert students* picked up on this....

so that it's not just a class in Reading Other Literatures, but also an
enaction of issues of difference and domination *and* (more subtly but it's
there for the alert) language practices and how they differ across
"ethnicities," genders, etc -- and the ways in which language "matters," as
a material part of the production of difference (um, i mean, knowledge) --
and to work like this, i've had to really revise my notion of What A
Teacher Is -- i'm no longer whacky aunt, nor ally, nor even facilitator --
i'm intervenor, yikes, not entirely comfortable for me....  i assure you,
there is very little transference looping in these classes (not true of my
other classes)....

so i continue to think that there might be less conflict (hey, i can dream)
if we hadn't right out of the gate been positioned *as* a marginalized
meetingplace that does *not* (socially, institutionally) require students'
full attention, commitment and capabilities...*generosities*, really....

so, by way of dreaming, i keep hoping i'll envision some new institutional
architecture that would address this problem, rather than create it....

thanks
kass

    Yes, as you point out, Kass, the responsibility for managing conflicting
points of view in classrooms is part of what we have to do. Learning how to
do that effectively isn't easy.
    One aspect of the problem is managing the level of the discussion that
emerges. It's interesting in this regard, that some graduate schools want
information in letters of reference on the kind of contribution a student
made to class discussions, e.g., did s/he extend thought.
                beatrice
bkachuck.cuny  @  prodigy.net