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

When You Do the Research

When Yo u Do the Resea rch The prejudices of the nation have become big business. Sedimented in our cultural values, American nationalism mingles as both motive and product—both economy and ideology. It circulates in what we make, acquire, sell, export, put on, ingest, and absorb, in our ideas about how “we” do business, in who “we” are, not to mention who every other right-thinking person in the world should want to be. And all through this process of cultural creation and sedimentation, nationalism infects even the higher motives of our lives. Through the conduit of culture, American nationalism is incorporated into our universities as lifestyleproduct , defining academic style and chic. And we compositionists have been distracted by our mistaken and under-theorized desire to serve our students, institutions, and nation, our commitments to our discipline and our desire to make names for ourselves in our own profession even as we have emulated the literary discipline. We compositionists have had our heads turned; consequently, we have not made the necessary turn to the study of the nation, nationalism, and internationalism. We have not needed to do so. The rhetoric of “our” cultural inheritance and its cultural and multicultural studies is all we have needed and needed to teach—or so we have seemed to think. After all, cultures are logical—or so we are told by cultural theorist Greg Urban. But here we are not talking about logical thinking but about cultural circulation. According to Urban, cultures circulate by a “metacultural logic,” a foundation of conscious and unconscious judgments that inspire, organize, and promote cultural activities, including the production of cultural objects. Indeed, as Urban points out, cultures usually follow more than one metacultural logic at a time. For instance, as cultures circulate, they distribute their preserved histories, which members reproduce so that others might adhere to tradition and maintain cultural coherence. When they do this, members are enacting a metacultural logic of “replication.” But even as cultures replicate when members dedicate themselves to conserving traditional values, other members can still follow a metacultural logic of “newness” that inspires them to innovate and produce novelty for future development. And when cultures follow a 156   national healing metacultural logic of “dissemination,” they circulate beyond their constituencies . Many move, as some nations aggressively do, outward, beyond their boundaries; they spread and sometimes accelerate in their development as they reach toward the future. (The nature of this movement will be affected by which logic—say, replication or newness—is more operative at a given time.) Finally, when cultures fail to develop by reaching outward or to the future, they run the risk of becoming subject to the forces of stagnation, entropy, and even dissolution. In the United States, one of the dominant culture’s leading lateral or replicant accelerants is, of course, the media, including, of particular interest for teachers of composition, the textbook publishing and teaching industry. Following logics of replication and newness, textbooks contain material that disseminates traditionally sanctioned forms of culture and national citizenship, but in slightly new ways. (Teachers will recognize the “slightly new” in the steady appearance of revised additions , or the reconfiguration of familiar subject matter under the rubric of the latest academic breakthrough.) Consequently, textbooks contain instructions for replicating the traditional, the comfortably known, even as each edition of the same text is packaged as the newest advancement in education. Effectively taught to teacher and student alike, a textbook’s pattern of maximum production and consumption inspires writing teachers to assign quickly written and evaluated texts (especially the ones that answer those questions for further discussion found at the end of selections in composition readers), and student texts serve both as conservation medium and useful propellant as the national culture progresses along its noisy pathways. In Urban’s terms, student essays are easily discernable as rational (2001, 33), because they fulfill the metacultural logic of replication (they replicate—or attempt to—familiar, traditional form). We can grade them with relative ease (discounting the long and tedious hours we spend on them), and we can see ourselves comfortably in our traditional authority as we do so. And as we finish reading a set of papers, textbooks—or a teacher’s assignment—quickly lead to another set, and the national culture is conserved, preserved, prolonged, and extended, all at the same time. What fires the engines of this merchandising of composition? Money is the obvious answer, but there are two other factors driving the textbook industry...