Chapter 6: Translating Chaos

Boundaries, Borders, Connections, Conclusion

Structural materialist theorizing have meant historically that class-based concerns have been privileged over others such as race or gender. Intellectual tourism results when scholars refuse to figure particular cultural forms, sujectivities and agencies into their theoretical formulations and subsume all of these under singular, totalizing social theories.

Expose the will to ignore. Read for the surprise of otherness...translation without a master. Canonical vs. peripheral texts. National vs. individual identity, conflict between personal and social change. Voices from the periphery, to be heard, require a cultural studies of listening, an "otic" theory.

"The exhilaration and significance of reading/writing literature... lie somewhere between the tentative naming of oneself and plunging into difference. The self-in-motion is constructed by the writing." Fictional, communal and autobiographical registers of identity.

Final Remarks
As educators, we must not act as agents of the state when we ask for autobiographies from students. We are not to appraise, but to include. As Morrison wrote, "shift attentions way from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised." It is love that brings together literature, marginality and curriculum.

Chapter 5: Autobiographical Heirs (Airs)--Cultural Studies and the Self

Autobiography as a genre has been a theoretical problem for literary critics, partly because it skirts fiction, overlps with it, can be social rather than individual, may contain more or less truth than fiction. Autobiography, as a search for identity, is a search for a moving target. The life and the thought are produced in the writing.

Edgerton traces various critical perspectives on autobiography. Possibility of collectivity in autobiography. She contends that much African-American autobiography has been directed at a project of antiracism. By writing the self into existence, writing an entire people along with it. It is only in our relations to others that identity, and thus autobiography, has meaning.

Autobiography in Fiction
Truth can be read in a text in ways unrelated to factual accuracy, particularly in terms of style or form. "The advantage of fiction writing over autobiography is that the writer can claim a greater distance, and the desire for ignorance is more readily exposed." If autobiography isn't truth, is it impossible and therefore useless? Is there a self to even write of if the self is in a constant state of flux? Can text even hint at the real person behind it?

Her method of autobiography involves the interreferential reading of autobiography, fiction and historical fiction set near her home or region, accompanied by reflectiver writing into self and other. Other is critical to sense of place.

Making the familiar strange by abandoning stereotypes and examining one's cliches. Teachers should work for their own, as well for students' self-awareness. Autobiography is not necessarily life story, but any style and approach to expressing /creating/learning about ourselves.

She goes on to discuss her choice of autobiographical text, the "Plantation" trilogy by Gwin Bristow, graphic in its depiction of life for poor whites in Louisiana, first published in 1939. Some comparisons to Gone With the Wind and Beloved in terms of the sense of place, poverty, and race.

She writes of the appeal of these Southern romance novels for women, and Bristow's novel for her in particular...memory and "rememory" (remembrance of collective events and thoughts). Mythical characters, like "Southern Belle" and legends rather than factual history.

Cruelty of southern plantation owners towards poor yet kindness and gentility at home, as if their place of dominance is natural or ordained. Bristow write from perspective of poor whites because supposedly most everything else is from p.o.v. of rich whites or slaves.

The novel doesn't challenge "the ahistoricism of Southern romance." But the value of rereading and rewriting about it is the suggestion of place (historically, psychologically, geographically) through which we can examine our relations to others, to self, to place.

Autobiography as cultural studies produces new relations and orientations to culture, promotes cross-cultural imagination or literacy of the imagination.

Student Autobiographies
She describes the autobiography unit she taught, its difficulties and importance for students. She describes several student autobiographies about reading and writing. The first presents a "surprise of otherness" and the possibilities for departures from culturl "scripts."

Conclusion
Self-reflective writing calls for a reconceptualization of multicultural teacher education and curriculum involving historical and current development of culyural studies and the politics of identity. Literary and autobiographical studies are interdisciplinary and intertextual. Cultural studies is a liberal arts discipline.

Chapter 4: Translating Curriculum with Literature and Cultural Studies

Stories are survival material, by which we create and re-create our lives, or heal, and tools for good teaching. Yet stories do not occupy the status of authority. "Our knowledge does not know what it knows."

Love and learning are two organizing themes for Edgerton's approach to reading. The search for voice impels much of the "literature of the margins" to proceed through a pedagogical imperative.

Intertextual Literary Readings

The rest of the chapter contains literary criticism...

Edgerton analyzez Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man from a perspective of the common marginality of women and African Americans. She discusses her themes of love and translation in the novel, comparing it to Toni Morrison's Beloved in terms of "Fusion Love" or eros. The duality of marginalization is evident in Invisibe Man because invisibility can be useful...the paradox of marginality. Negotiated, "deconstructed" love provides the turning-around place for a more autonomous, yet connected, life in both novels.

She posits similarities between Beloved and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, comparing Sethe and Amy Denver to Jim and Huck. She discusses the term "Signifyin'" as a repetition and reversal of a sentence, phrase or idea in orde to retain instability of meaning. (Example of Coltrane performing "My Favorite Things" resemblance through dissemblance.)

Discussion of Ellison and black critics' responses to Huck Finn. Are Invisible Man's allusions to Huck Finn signifyin' or translation? Signifyin' is an African American literary technique, not necessary to compare to any European literary techniques.

The south needs a social psychoanalysis and novelists are an important part of that analysis. "Lines of flight" of marginalized characters only possible through inner searching and community help can lead to wisdom...not repressing the past. When love and historical consciousness become overwhelmed by guilt (like Sethe in Beloved and like the South obsessing over the past, growth is not possible.

Ellison's novel trabslates and "converses" with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Rosa, the main character, a "hysterical male identification. Could Faulkner write her otherwise than male?"

Richard Wright thought Their Eyes Were Watching God was counter-revolutionary, partly because of her writing in dialect. No direct references to oppression. Self-division can be against or for the self, unhealthy or creative.

Janie, narrator or Their Eyes Were Watching God ends in "accomplished solitude," a choice of communal marginality.

Jamaica Kincaid's technique in Lucy is metissage, "initiating a genuine dialogue with the dominnt discourses they hope to transform, thus ultimately favoring exchange rather than provoking conflict." She reverses colonizer/colonized and tourist/native hierarchies. Only by being neither master nor slave does one become merely human. Lucy and Mariah develop a mutually pedagogical relationship.

Absurdity of West Indian children having to memorize and write about poems describing English countrysides rather than their own. Kincaid's method of studying history to is to study domination.

Chapter Three: Theory and Difference

Subheadings: Marginality, Essentialism, Translation, Love

The marginalized know more about the group, culture or society that keeps them far from the center than can members of that center know about the margins. Yet neither margin nor center exists without the other. There is an infusion of each in the oter. This idea is reffered to as currere of marginality.
It is both a particular approach to autobiography focussed on marginality, and a curriculum of marginality.

This curriculum of marginality is about excavating excluded stories. Excluding them in favor of happy or safe stories leads to apathy and violence. Distinguish social marginality from individual marginality without getting stuck in a language of oppositions, of polarities. What Edgerton calls the interactive layer of marginality is sometimes a dialectical synthesis of social/individual or even larger, social/community/individual, and sometimes a deconstruction of those layers, which undermines claims to a "positive" stable identity for either self or other, margin or center.

Dialectical thinking is dependent on a notion of structure which presupposes a center of meaning of some sort. A dialectical approach depends on conceptualization as direct connection to the real, thus giving rise to the possibiolity for synthesis or incorporation. it is a movement between concepts in search of the knowable. Dialectical thinking is predicated on an "ordered structure."

Deconstruction is based in rereadings--the refusal of final meaning (or synthesis). It proceeds in search of a space between concepts--a marking of the unknowable. Solutions are perpetually deferred. The value of deconstruction over dialectics is its self-conscious recognition of the ordered structure and the way in which the structure itself produces, necessarily, victims. Possibilities and visions for processes/movements capable of minimizing violence and victimization seem most plausible through an awareness that works to keep power and meaning in motion.

Freire operates through dialectical thinking in his approach to the oppressed (marginalized) and thus to identity in that he believes that only the oppressed can understand the full significance of oppression, and are the only ones who'll have the vision and strength to eliminate it.

Encounters between marginalized people and their oppressors involve "differences between" and require one-way translation (translation with a master). Those that take place without a master (within a community) can set cultural power in motion.
Individual margins are encounters across "differences within" oneself, sometimes surprising the self. A reading that sets up the conditions for a knowledge-wthin-difference would proceed through some degree of awareness regarding collective and individual histoories. These readings, such as autobiographies, can be attempts at identity formation.

It has has to do with the necessity of coming to terms with difference and otherness...difference between margin and center. A society that values learning listens to its margins. This puts margins in a double bind because they must function within a cultural memory that is not their own. The meaning of "I am this" changes completely when responded to as "You are that."

Essentialism, on the other hand, depends on who is utilizing it, how it is deployed, and where its effects are concentrated. An example is the legal definitions of race. (Susie Phipps in Louisiana, 1982.) Resisting from the margins, through literature and art, gives us significance.

Translation and Tradition
Edgerton goes on to discuss different definitions of translation that go beyond the literal, everything from somatic, to culturual, to historic, to interdisciplinary, to notions of transformation rather than translation. Translation can occur across layers of marginality ("autoethnography" of Z.N. Hurston). In a situation of dominance, the cultural translation is all one-way with severe penalties for those who cease to adapt to the demands of the dominant group.

Tradition, when translated, is rearticulated, reinterpreted, reterritorialized. Edgerton's theory of marginality insists on the possibility for dynamic self-creatiion for the margins through translation and love. Communication and translation are exercised in the attempt to eliminate the noise of otherness. For translation to be a two-way process, local historical circumstances (relations among cultural groups of a place) have to be excavated and acknowledged.

Love in the Margins

Love is the solution but is no solution because it resists the framework a "solution" requires. Love is also about listening, a marginalized part of language. "Feminine" conceptionm of love is marginalized in philosophical literature. Edgerton defines a feminine conception of love as not hierarchalizing, artifically splitting agape and eros mind and body, spirituality and sexuality.

Agape, self-less love considered highest by Christian {male} theology. Eros, physical, romantic, etc.. (Glad I was never Christian). Agape, love of god to mortals, Platonic, Freudian. "Male" definitions of love always this duality, hierarchy. Mind and body...St. Augustine and Plato wrote women were all body and men all mind.

The displacement or deconstruction of hierarchical love is found in the idea of transference love, a pedogogical situation. It is the prerequisitie for translation without a master, a necessary condition for pedagogy. Transference is love directed toward knowledge. Learning and love are deferred.

Another kind of love is eco-erosic...love of the land, the erarth, all people and living things without exclusivity. This is the love we should bring as teachers. (Makes me think, disconnectedly, of Crowley's "Love is the law. Love under will.")

Conclusion:
A femine/feminist standpoint is more capapble of displacing three hierarchicalized oppositions (center/margin, mind/body, agape/eros) than is a standpoint at the center. Encounters between cultures are what constitutes the very notion of culture, and the results of these encounters are manifested in regionally particularistic forms. (These words like "particularistic" and "problematization" are killing me.)

Nonsynchrony refers to complex dealings with differences between, an example being one's racial interests coming into conflict with one's gendered issues. Readings of differences within and their interactions with differences between are crucial to development of cultural theories that do not disarticulate radical minority and feminist concerns.

Chapter Two: Multiculturalism into Cultural Studies

Critiques of multiculturalism:
Among the earliest are "cultural deprivation"--cultures or cultural forms that are deprived of what is most valuable for quality of life. The "dominant culture" determines what is most valuable.
"Pluralism" and tolerance" education are similar in that they imply a norm against what is "different." Usually this is shallow and makes perfectably obvious what the centrist culture entails. Again, meant to avoid politicizing and rage.

Cultural studies insists that any aspect of history be examined from multiple perspectives, most particularly from the perspectives of those most affected or most victimized by events, policies and phenomena. Interdisciplinary, cross-cultural studies can take "Western" content, add "minority" content that relates, and for ma conversation.

Cultural studies provide a frame better theorized and more sensitive to particularities of context than multiculturalism.

Cultural studies can be said to have originated in Britian in the '50s among "marginalized" instructors. It has gained legitimacy since. Literary criticism is a leading part or point of origin for cultural studies. Early writings on the topic shifted from a literary-moral to an anthropological definition of culture...cultures, not Culture.

English cultural studies orgins focused on neglected materials from popular culture and mass media, as well as deployment of literary critical methods to study these materials. Long debate between structuralists and culturalists.

Sexual differences precede social class differences. Social class is more complicated by its interactions with gender issues. Same with race. Rather than defining cultural studies, which codifies and therefore constrains it, "Strategies of definitions" were proposed. Cultural studies must resist being departmentalized i.e. incorporated into other departments, such as English or sociology. Another danger is isolating cultural studies in universities, making it non-activist. Important to maintain the tension between intellectual work and political work of cultural studies.

The public discourse around current controversies over the humanities ans school curricula in the US was framed by conservative and neoconservative academics. Humanities what teach "the good" as defined as aesthetically pleasurable, or true and eternal orcommon, Western culture. The major split between two rough categories of views: those who view Western cultural studies as having a discernable "essence" and is primary, and those who question such essentialism and/or primacy of Western culture in the study of Humanities.

Defining Humanities another issue. Does it include social sciences? And since these are textual, they can also be interpreted through literary criticism. Determining whether there should be a core curriculum of cultural studies or afrocentric history, which would make it more of a "discipline" is another debate in the field.
One contingent can be called the "Western Essentialists," who argue that "the good" is knowable and objective. Critics of this essentialism say that reinterpretation of the so-called "best thoughts and finest utterances" is the only way that social or individual change can take place. The possibilities for multiple interpretations suggest an impossibility for certainty that shatters an essentialist structure.

The essentialist view treats culture (Western, African or Native-American) as existing in isolation from other cultures. A liberal education provides a passage to transformation of ideologies rather than mere transmission. Translating textual tradition involves the reading of "old" and "new" texts together in an intertext that is simultaneously faithful to the old and available to the new.

Moving multiculturalism into cultural studies means to move through theory as a necessary detour on the way to something more important. Link theory to political goals, to larger worlds of texts and bodies and back again.

Introduction

Brad's first comment:
I just began reading Translating the Curriculum by Susan Huddleston Edgerton. I want to get the blog ball rolling, so a quick thought or two follow.

Cultural studies is antidisciplinary and better measured by autobiographical writing than by any test. Most autobiographical writing, like most histories, relates trauma and grief.

The history of violence is the lack of acceptance of Difference or Otherness. If accepted and cherished, these differences can lead to profound learning (and peace and love and all that groovy stuff). Seems beyond the predilections of most humans.

Introduction:
Cultural studies involves translation across academic and non-academic discourses and across academic disciplines. Translation not only of language, but of nuance. Cultural studies must be incorporated into educational reform. Cultural studies in education needs more diverse representation. Poor translations abound. Her project is to bring cultural studies to bear upon curriculum. We have to force a multiculturalism into the curriculum in order for educators to really appreciate how minorities often are not given a voice. Too tfne multicultural education is weakened in order to silence rage.

Canon debates are crucial, because they are debates about culture. Most social theory about non-Western literature is written by Western critics about marginalized people, rather than including them. Autobiography provides a conjuncture with literature for exploring local context.

Primary themes: marginality, essentialism translation, love...reformulating the curriculum question "What knowledge is of most worth?" to "What knowledge best enables us to care for ourselves, one another and the nonhuman world?" What knowledge best enables us to minimize violence? A curriculum of rage, love and hope.