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93  Identity Politics and the Right/Left Convergence predictably, conservatives in many countries were not enthusiastic about the “seismic shift” manifested in these decolonizing projects. In the United States, the right accused multicultural “identity politics” of causing racial“balkanization” and“ethnic separatism.” In a faux populist attack stagemanaged by elite circles in the Republican Party, the right ridiculed these projects as a new politically correct version of the communist menace. Right-wing polemicists mocked what they saw as oversensitive do-gooders stifling free speech in the name of touchy-feely sympathy for minorities. In an analogy that aligned the tumultuous 1960s with the French Revolution and the politically correct 1990s with the Reign of Terror, journalist Richard Bernstein accused multicultural leftists of wanting to install a “dictatorship of virtue.”1 Recycling Cold War rhetoric, conservative figures such as Allan Bloom,William Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, and Lynne Cheney, in tandem with liberals such as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., denounced any identity-based critique of inequality as un-American. Thus, George H. W. Bush in May 1991 publicly denounced the “political extremists . . . setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race.” In a sense, the right was retrofitting its old “class warfare” rhetoric—that is, the notion that to call attention to class inequality was to wage “class warfare”—to the issue of race.To speak of racial inequality, by analogy, was to wage“race warfare,” just as to speak of gender inequality was to wage“gender warfare.” The virulence of these attacks manifested a fear not only of greater racial, economic, and political equality but also of nonexceptionalist narrativizations of history. Thus, Schlesinger ridiculed “underdog,” “compensatory,” and “there’salways -a-black-man-at-the-bottom-of-it” approaches to historiography, whose sole function was to provide“social and psychological therapy” and“raise the selfesteem of children from minority groups.”2 But if minorities have indeed been traumatized by their experience in dominant educational institutions, “therapy” is clearly preferable to “trauma.” Why should only the dominant Euro-American group have its narcissism massaged by official histories, while others suffer the body blows of stereotype and marginalization? In any case, the call to decolonize historical pedagogy was not ultimately a question of self-esteem. Nor was it a question of a bland “I’m OK, you’re OK” history or of “telling both sides.” Apart from the fact that historical debates have innumerable “sides,” a polycentric anticolonial history by definition would benefit the dissenting voices that have been 94 Identity Politics and the Right/Left Convergence excluded from official history. Nor is it a question of randomly“adding” voices but rather of taking on board voices that challenge the dominant, top-down version of history. Nor was it a matter of “lowering standards” but rather of raising them by requiring knowledge of more cultures, more languages, more perspectives. In a literary corollary, the partisans of multicultural politics were portrayed by the right as wanting to eject all the great writers—the notorious “dead white males”—from the literary canon. For William Phillips,“politically correct” teachers were“denouncing the traditions and values of the West . . . [and substituting] African and Asian traditions and values.”3 The race-conscious left was depicted as eager to replace the great writers, in a literary/pedagogic coup d’état, with mediocre authors whose only qualification was their gender or their color. Alice Walker was replacing Shakespeare! But the goal was never to eliminate Shakespeare but rather to expand the canon, and even to explore the multiculturality of Shakespeare’s capacious Globe, which embraces not only European culture in all its exuberant diversity but also the ethnic relationality of Moor and Venetian in Othello, of Egyptian and Roman in Antony and Cleopatra, of European and African/indigenous American in The Tempest, and of Jew and gentile in The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, The Tempest’s confrontation between Prospero and Caliban has generated a vast anticolonial posttext. It is this multiculturality that makes it possible to reread The Tempest, as Aimé Césaire, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Jean Franco have done, as anticolonialist or to see The Merchant of Venice as sympathetic to Shylock or to relocate Romeo and Juliet in the barrios of New York (West Side Story) or in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Maré). But the most frequently reiterated charge was that of “separatism,” as evidenced in the constant recourse to metaphors...

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