Page 115 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

EXPERIENCE, EMPATHY AND STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM 109

Notes

1 This is an expanded version of my Keynote Address presented to the ‘Teaching
Cultural Encounters as General Education Conference’, organized by St Lawrence
University and American Association of Colleges and University held in New
Orleans 2–4 March 1995. I am grateful to the organizers of the conference for the
opportunity to articulate and share my ideas, and particularly to Grant Cornwell and
Eve Stoddard who invited me, and Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine who
recommended me. I thank I.M.A.Lederer, Shireen K.Lewis, Denise Eileen
McCoskey, V.Y.Mudimbe and Charlie Piot for comments on earlier drafts of this
article.
2 E.San Juan, jnr. succinctly points out that ‘race implicates peoples and social
structures in historical processes of dissociation and exclusion that have
distinguished the trajectory of Western civilization, particularly since the European
colonization of the Middle East, Africa Asia and the Americas’ (1992:5). For a full
development of his theory of race against the inadequacy of ethnicity theories see
San Juan jnr., 1992.
3 Grant Cornwell, professor of philosophy and associate Dean of the First Year, and
Eve Stoddard, professor of English and Director of International Education, have
spent the last three years involved in an intensive faculty development seminar at
St Lawrence University, which brought together seventeen faculties from across
the disciplines to read, discuss and design an interdisciplinary curriculum about
central issues in interculturalism for undergraduates.
4 Gloria Marshall discusses the fact that whiteness as a monolithic category is a very
recent phenomenon and racial classifications of European people in the United
States laid the foundation for the 1924 Immigration Bill which imposed restrictions
on Southern and Eastern Europeans seeking entry into the country. The question of
‘ethnicity’ which Irish, Italians, Greeks, Portuguese and Jews have struggled over—
a hyphenated identity which has not always been voluntary—is a legacy from the
period when they were viewed as being a ‘racial’ other (Marshall, 1993).
5 See King(1991:133–45).
6 For one of the most articulate analyses of the grave consequences which result from
neglecting power and subject positions of teachers and the urgent need for
developing antiracist pedagogy, see Giroux, 1992.
7 At the same time, theorizing about cultural fluidity needs to be tempered by a
conceptual framework that persistently interrogates the space of theoretical
procedures and the conditions of theory’s claims. For instance, David Scott
challenges the way theory is taken for granted as a ‘narrative that has authored (and
authorized) the hegemonic career of the West’. In this context he questions the
move to undermine the notion of culture: ‘this recognizably “anti-essentialist”
characterisation of “culture” as mobile, as unbounded, as hybrid and so on, is itself
open to question: for whom is ‘culture’ unbounded—the anthropologist or the
native?’ (Scott, 1992:375f).
8 For a full discussion of this argument see Cesarani, 1994:81–4.
9 On white identities, Peter MacLaren writes: ‘being white is an entitlement… to a
raceless subjectivity. That is, being white becomes the invisible norm for how
dominant culture measures its own civility’ (MacLaren, 1991:244).