Page 114 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

108 CULTURAL STUDIES

bounded, fixed or that ‘race’ is an essence shared by all members of any given
group. Instead, these ‘discursive invented space[s]’ take the beingness of black
as experiential sources which can be drawn on without apology. 28 Therefore,
while we should delegitimize the use of race and culture as metonyms for one
another, this need not invalidate a notion of race-based communities of
29
meaning. Such a notion reflects the efficacy of political strategies rather than
the biologization of ideology. Furthermore, contrary to the claims of both its
staunch adversaries and blind advocates, constructive strategic essentialism does
not negate the plurality of identities and their mutability (De Lauretis, 1993). While
it may be poor philosophy, strategic essentialism does register the politics of
commitment described in the following quotation from British cultural studies
scholar Stuart Hall:

Political identity often requires the need to make conscious commitments.
Thus it may be necessary to momentarily abandon the multiplicity
of cultural identities for more simple ones around which political lines
have been drawn. You need all the folks together, under one hat, carrying
one banner, saying we are for this, for the purpose of this fight, we are all
the same, just black and just here.
(cf.Grossberg, 1993:101)

Finally, a third comment, which is actually a question, evolves from my own
biography and commitment to strategic essentialism as a political position to
which I am sympathetic—as a Jewish-Israeli whose mother became a refugee
from Nazi Austria at the age of 8 while most of her relatives, including the great-
grandmother for whom I am named, were murdered in Hitler’s concentration
30
camps; and as an American black whose father is of West Indian heritage as a
result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and includes, along the way, a Scottish
great-grandfather as well as Jamaican relatives of Chinese descent. Slavery,
segregation and discrimination are therefore historical legacies of my past which
I choose not to forget and against which I am always engaged in struggle.
Having noted this, the question with which I conclude is neither facile nor
facetious: How do we separate our personal politics from our pedagogy without
compromising our principles and ideals? For, in the final analysis, if our
objective in the classroom is to politicize the consciousness of our students by
opening up a world of ideas and introducing the variety of environments and
circumstances which shape the different ways of thinking and acting of people
across the globe—which is what teaching cultural encounters is all about—then I
believe we also have an obligation to strive for maximizing objectivity in the best
sense of the word. Of course, this leads into a debate on whether the notion of
objectivity is still thinkable after the triumph of deconstruction. 31