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

And So?

An d So ? In order to construct pedagogies that resist racism, we need to understand our responses to others. The quest for this knowledge will take us to the origins of who we are. It is a journey through dark places where we confront truths about ourselves we might otherwise like to avoid. Julia Kristeva (1993a) maps the path in her collection, Nations Without Nationalism. Specifically, she explains how the origins of our racism can be found in the psychosexual processes of individuation where the unconscious processes that lead us to become ourselves also lead us to construct and maintain social commitments. Unfortunately, some of these commitments follow nationalist and racist impulses. In the beginning was hatred, Freud said basically (contrary to the well-known biblical and evangelical statement), as he discovered that the human child differentiates itself from its mother through rejection affect, through the scream of anger and hatred that accompanies it, and through the “no” sign as prototype of language and of all symbolism. To recognize the impetus of that hatred aroused by the other, within our own psychic dramas of psychosexual individuation—that is what psychoanalysis leads us to. It thus links its own adventure with the meditations each one of us is called upon to engage in when confronted with the fascination and horror that a different being produces in us, such meditations being prerequisite to any legal and political settlement of the immigration problem. (1993c, 29–30) Racism’s roots can be traced to our origins, to the processes of subjectivity through which we become who we are. Of course, this does not mean that we must necessarily be racist or even entertain racism. Nor does it mean that individuals are synonymous with the nation in which they live. It does mean, though, that we have some hard and unsettling work ahead of us if we want to resist racism. As Kristeva writes, “The complex relationships between cause and effect that govern social groups obviously do not coincide with the laws of the unconscious regarding a subject, but these unconscious determinations remain a constituent part, an essential one, of social and therefore national dynamics” (1993b, 50). If this is true, and I believe that And So?     173 it is, then we must learn ourselves, if we are to understand our affiliations —and our hatreds. We compositionists must learn what we ignore when we commit to the extension of one cultural tributary to the exclusion of all others. We must learn the racism at the heart of our curriculum. We must learn the pain we both endure and perpetuate if we hope to animate our personal agency and possibility of a different way of teaching and being in the world—our agency. And I say this because I believe that education is still our best avenue for freeing ourselves from the cult of origins that informs the teaching of writing in our schools, colleges and universities : “Indeed, I am convinced that, in the long run, only a thorough investigation of our remarkable relationship with both the other and strangeness within ourselves can lead people to give up hunting for the scapegoat outside their group, a search that allows them to withdraw into their own ‘sanctum’ thus purified: is not the worship of one’s ‘very own’; of which the ‘national’ is the collective configuration, the common denominator that we imagine we have as ‘our own,’ precisely, along with other ‘own and proper’ people like us?” (1993b, 50–51). We must learn ourselves as we learn about others because we must know ourselves if we are to know how and what we make of others. It is precisely in these processes that nationalism resides, and with hard and honest work we can find it there. We may seek anonymity in our national affiliation, in our relationship to others whom we deem to be like us. But, finally, this sort of affiliating will not, in and of itself, bring us peace. As Kristeva explains it, “devotees of origins anxiously seek shelter among their own, hoping to suppress the conflicts they have with them by projecting them on others—the strangers” (1993c, 3–4). We need to liberate ourselves of our conflict with our own kind by relegating responsibility onto others whom we deem to be different. After all, someone has to be responsible. We need to learn, in other words, how to free ourselves from the “cult of origins” that binds us to our hatreds and separates...