Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. Cary Nelson
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 to have a long, complex, and indirect life, a life that continues to reverberate long after students may have forgotten many of the texts they actually read in class.
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