students literariness as something they can identify with, as a subject position they can occupy, while constructing it as an ideology that transcends such passing material trivialities as racial justice. In a fundamentally racist society, choosing to marginalize or ignore the study of minority literature, as English departments did throughout their history until the 1990s, articulates literary study to racism.
To entice students into making a significant commitment to the study of literature, we often display its place in our own lives, telling them, in effect, that literature is one of the finer things on earth, that it exhibits at once a powerful realism about the human condition and a visionary synthesis of its highest ambitions. But what does it mean to attach this whole program for transcendence to the experience of only one race, one sex, a restricted set of class fractions within a few national cultures? What does it mean that the experiences of most of the world’s peoples are obliterated in the “humanism” of the English curriculum? As the authors of Rewriting English put it: “Beneath the disinterested procedures of literary judgment and discrimination can be discerned the outlines of other, harsher words: exclusion, subordination, dispossession” (Batsleer et al., 30). These are not issues of coverage—this term, which apparently encapsulates the whole thoughtfulness of our model of the English major, suggests a comparison between the depth of our disciplinary model and the claims of a brand of paint—but rather issues of the social effects of disciplinary specialization.
By the mid-1990s anthologies had changed radically, with wide representation of women and minority writers. Here and there around the country a few instructors refuse to teach these texts. But it is now very difficult for an undergraduate to take survey courses in literature and not encounter a far more diverse canon than we have taught throughout our history. Yet the depth of thoughtfulness attending this new pedagogy remains doubtful. Faculty members are certainly persuaded that our meaningful literary history was far more diverse than we believed for decades, but narrow issues of coverage and representation still dominate discussions of the curriculum. As I will argue in the next chapter, the work of conceptualizing and teaching anthologies involves wider political and social issues and responsibilities than many in the discipline are comfortable in acknowledging.
Just as students now encounter works by women and minorities regularly, many of them also take courses in interpretive theory. But neither the students nor the faculty who teach them feel much inclined to challenge the social meaning of the discipline as a result. We need, for example, to recognize that literary idealization is necessarily in dialogue with, and embedded in, all the other idealizations by which our culture sustains and justifies itself. Studying literature in a self-reflexive and culturally aware fashion entails asking how the available forms of idealization feed into and relate to one another. These forms are the idealized subject positions offered to us (and from which, to some degree, we choose)—from the subject position of one who loves literature to the subject position of one who loves his or her country, from the idealization of poetry to the idealization of national power.
Many devotees of literature would assume they have no necessary common ground with devotees of the nation state, but the record suggests otherwise. First, the worldwide curricular and scholarly privileging of national literatures—so deeply embedded in our assumptions that it seems a fact of nature—not only disguises other ways of conceptualizing the field but also links literary studies to every exceptionalist narrative of national destiny, grants institutional literary study part of its social rationale, and underwrites the economic basis of the profession. As recent materialist scholarship has shown, the teaching of Shakespeare helps socialize people into their national identity.
However marginalized literary study may be in the United States, therefore, it is nonetheless implicated in an overdetermined field of privileged social roles and admired cultural domains. Indeed, there are differential relations of mutual dependency between the various idealizations that structure and facilitate the ideologies of our moment. Negotiations between and among those differential relations make possible not only our academic specializations but also our governmental policies. We need to draw a map of the relations between literature and our other valorized and devalued domains and discourses. We need to inquire how and why certain concepts—like “literature” or “freedom”—have their inner contradictions precipitated out and become elevated to a transcendent status within the social formation. For it is not the same to teach English when our economy is impoverishing millions of our citizens. It is not irrelevant to the study of literature that members of Congress are trying to reverse the civil rights gains of the last thirty years. The connotative effects of the ideals of the whole history of literature become quite different in such changing social contexts. And the social function and impact of the classroom become quite different as well.
A liberal reading of the curriculum presupposes that a universal decency, fairness, and empathy are somehow encouraged by the values promoted within a limited textual corpus.3 To press such matters further is to ask, with what some may feel is an unseemly focus on current events rather than on the transcendent values of the discipline, what an English professor’s role might be in educating students to participate in a democracy. But the question of whether the privileged forms of idealization in the West—privileged again in the discipline of English studies—will necessarily produce either a national or an international sense of multiracial community has already been answered negatively. The historically empowered configuration of the discourses of Western humanism has repeatedly failed. To see it as our job merely to praise that tradition in its present form is to be certain to perpetuate that failure. This is not to say that there are no resources in the tradition. I use those resources throughout this book; its discourses about the rights of workers underwrites Manifesto’s whole last section. It is rather to say that the tradition needs to be rethought, critically theorized, significantly restructured, and realigned in relation to other discourses.
What I am calling for, therefore, is not merely a culturally expanded discipline, something we have substantially achieved in the last decade, but a theoretically self-critical and reflective one, something we still lack. If I am against English as it was, then, I am far from an unqualified fan of English as it is, and I have little confidence in what English will be five or ten years from now. Having recovered from an unbroken history of sexism and become barely aware of our long night of racism, we are rapidly descending into a gulag labor program. On the other hand, the theory revolution of the last three decades has given us the intellectual resources we need to reform ourselves, to theorize our disciplinary practices and our relations to the larger culture. It has given us the terms, categories, vantage points, and modes of analysis we need to see ourselves more clearly. That is the larger promise of the unitary term “theory,” and it is a promise, as I hope to demonstrate in what follows, that we ignore at our certain peril.
2 MULTICULTURALISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES
FROM ANTHOLOGIES TO THE SOCIAL TEXT
The alien is the nation, nothing more or less. . . .
The alien is the nation. Nothing else.
—Genevieve Taggard, “Ode in Time of Crisis”
I want to take up the question of multiculturalism by addressing the subject of anthologies, not only because they are one of the major ways of bringing together texts from a variety of cultural traditions but also because anthologies that are explicitly multicultural—as anthologies of American literature are increasingly tending to be—are also a means of constructing in miniature textual versions of a larger multicultural society.1 Anthologies are, in a significant way, representations of the wider social text, figurations of the body politic; their compilation and use is thus fraught with social and political meaning and responsibility. What conservatives see as the illegitimate contamination of anthologies and the literature classroom with other (justly or unjustly) analogous structures is neither hypothetical nor improbable. It is one of the immediate effects of putting the anthology form to use and it may well be one of the few effects
