National Healing: Race, State, and the Teaching of Composition

Nationalism

Nationalism Change begins at home. If we educators are to teach for a world free of racism, a world where all nations cooperate to solve problems such as the climate crisis we face, we will need to learn how our teaching serves—or fails to serve—our nation, the state, and its citizens. Along the way, we will need to question some of our deepest held beliefs about the teaching of writing, and we may discover that what once stood as the sources and rationales for our teaching have become traps from which we now need to escape. A healthier nation. A healthier world. Question our deepest held beliefs. These are tall orders, especially when so many of us composition instructors often teach so many sections of our subject each semester. These are tall orders for we who feel so isolated and besieged in hostile departments and colleges, and often for such little remuneration. But we must teach for the health of our nation and world, no matter how great the material demands and how much realities are stacked against us. I understand that some readers may stop short, saying that national and global concerns are not the appropriate content of writing instruction . They will argue that we have enough to do just reading all the papers so that we prepare students for the writing that they might do in their next classes. As sympathetic as I am to the heavy workloads that compositionists carry, I still believe that no matter how locked we feel into our own circumstances and subject matter, once we understand the relation between how we teach writing and the state of our nation, we see just how responsible we are for both. It is an eye-opening, sometimes unnerving, sometimes even shocking, lesson. You see, it is all in the glue that connects our teaching to the policies and actions of our country. Nationalism is the feeling of affiliation that binds a people within and to a nation and its identity. It is a feeling of belonging, of being a part, of identity in its relation to land and border and neighbors, even when the neighbors may be of different ethnicities. Nationalism leads a varied citizenry to work to maintain the political independence of a nation by motivating the public to meet the responsibilities of citizenship as they are enumerated in discourses of loyalty 130   national healing and patriotism. Nationalism draws its power from the strength of tradition , the shared cultural values that are identified as sources of prosperity and the inhibiting of those identified as destructive to the social fabric, including expressions of subversive minority cultural affiliation. Consolidated and transferred, in part, by means of capitalist production and consumption of print and media (Anderson 1983), nationalism is the ideology of citizenship, and, in large part, it orchestrates the suppression of minority languages and structures the content of education. Language and education—these are our domains. Because we compositionists are responsible for literacy, we contribute to the maintenance of nationalist ideology. We play our part in supporting the majority language, the forms of majority discourses—to the detriment of others —and the health of the nation. It is a role we hardly acknowledge, let alone comprehend. It is time for understanding. An influential historian and theorist of nationhood, Anthony D. Smith points out that the concept of nationalism has a long and complicated history. In fact, he claims that there are as many definitions of nationalism as there are historians to define it. So, naturally, Smith offers his own. Nationalism is, he writes, an ideology for “attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential nation” (1971, 171). This definition is important for a number of reasons . It tells us that nationalism works at the level of belief, that it calls for the maintaining of affiliation and trust in the value of unity, and that it informs the identity of those people included in the common good, the national membership. At the same time, this definition also reminds us that, precisely because nationalism is an ideology, some citizens are exerting authority—or power—to maintain the “unity and identity on behalf” of a nation’s population. Nationalism depends on a complex of governmental policies, judgments and controls, laws and rewards, and statements of values and interests, all interacting to unite a people, even a people that would otherwise be divided...