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

National Recalcitrance

National Recalcitrance Graduate students, like their professors, sometimes bring and give voice to the malignant side effects of nationalism in class. As I described in Part 1, “Cage: The Provincial Composition,” I teach a class called Rhetorical Traditions. Mostly the class sessions are filled with exciting and insightful discussions with teachers from around the world, but there have been moments in my classes’ study of various rhetorical perspectives where a student will say something that I wish I had not heard. I am thinking this moment of one class session where we were discussing Harriet Malinowitz’s Textual Orientations (1995) and an Arab male from Saudi Arabia claimed that the book was not relevant to his experience as there are no gay people in his country. I still remember the uncomfortable quiet that followed his comment as the other students considered, I suppose, the veracity of this statement as well as how to respond to it. I know that so many things went through my head. I knew that I could not let the comment stand. “Do I tell him that he does not know his own country?” I thought. I immediately considered the implications of doing so. The risk of insulting the man to his face was probably higher than I could estimate. I thought back to an earlier semester when a European student in Rhetorical Traditions protested when she felt that our day’s discussion of Eurocentric rhetoric was not respecting her national heritage . With a tone of exasperation, she said, “I object to all this talk about Eurocentrism. I am Italian, not Swedish.” She was right to object, of course. Discussions of Eurocentrism are the kind of talk in which specifics are blurred in the sometimes necessary, broad, and essentializing strokes of language. She felt that the uniqueness of her nationality—and her identity—were coming under erasure in class discussions. As she spoke, I thought how white students might be more likely to speak their resistance to rhetorical pluralism if they felt that they had more to lose, that their specific heritage meant power they were loath to see questioned . And all of this reminded me of a black student in another class who had objected to the concept of Afrocentricity because she felt her identity connected to the United States and not Africa. At any rate, a lot was going through my mind as I considered the alternatives. National Recalcitrance     209 And in that moment—or, well, perhaps it was two—and maybe I am conflating moments together in my memory—another male, Saudi national spoke up, “Of course there are gay people in our country, but they remain invisible because they live in danger.” Resistance to multiculturalism can manifest in many ways. I remember a Christian graduate student from the United States who felt that reading Harriet Malinowitz’s Textual Orientations was an immoral imposition . Or the one who complained, for religious reasons, that we were reading selections from The Holy Qur-An in our class’s investigation into traditional thinking about language and rhetoric. Matters of religion are seldom far from the “us versus them” thinking at the heart of nationalism. At any rate, moments such as these can shake one’s confidence in people and one’s hope that things can indeed actually change, that educating teachers might make things better somehow for future writing students. Yes, it is important that students articulate their resistances, and certainly the questioning of the patriarchal and racialized power of Eurocentric rhetoric can touch deep and dark places of fear and resentment—can lead to moments of debilitating self-loathing (Kristeva 1993b, 3). In Minor Re/Visions, Morris Young demonstrates how local, rhetorical choices, intentions, and agenda are affected by nationalism. In resistance to negative, traditional perceptions of writers of color other than white, and of local literatures and societies, he argues for processes of re/vision, the constructive work of rereading and reinterpreting our narratives for the possibilities they suggest for overcoming historical and structural power hierarchies—including racism. Young’s sense of re/vision is markedly hopeful and affirmative, even as he is anything but blind to the obstacles. As he writes about Minor Re/Visions: “While I have argued throughout this book that re/vision is a central trope and practice that provides people of color and others in minor positions to narrate themselves into the American story, we have seen a change in the cultural imagination that has made re/vision a...