The Victims’ Revolution
It’s March 2010, and I’m at the University of California, Berkeley, for the annual Cultural Studies Association Conference. It is, to a large extent, a gathering of youth—of graduate students and very junior faculty.
At one session a long-haired, fine-featured young man named Stephen, who reminds me a bit of the actor Matthew Gray Gubler on Criminal Minds, gives a talk in which he criticizes homeowners for “participating in global capitalism.” There’s plenty of rhetoric about “the hegemony of absolute space,” “ontological security,” and so on. But his point is clear: “We have no claim to our families’ property.” Though he acknowledges his own fantasy of a two-story house “with a wraparound porch,” he recoils at his own dream. “When we succumb to pity for an old woman losing her house,” he insists, “we abandon social justice,” since we are buying into the idea of an “individual’s monopolistic right” over a space.
Another young speaker, Mimi, is here to talk about that iconic 1972 photo of a little girl running naked and terrified from a South Vietnamese napalm attack. Mimi notes that the girl, Kim Phúc, has forgiven the United States and is now traveling around the country celebrating American freedom. This angers Mimi, for whom that old photo conveys such a powerful anti-American message. What happens to the message, she asks, when the girl grows up to do such a terrible thing? Phúc’s “loving embrace of America,” charges Mimi, “seems a betrayal of the photo.” What, she asks, are we “as theorists” to make of the fact that Phúc “appears not to feel anger when we think she should”?
Then there’s a young woman named Michelle, whose paper carries the title “Towards a Green Marxist Cultural Studies: Notes on Value and Human Domination over Nature.” Pretty highfalutin. But when she opens her mouth she sounds like a parody of a Valley girl: “Um, I’m like a grad student at UC Davis?” Michelle says that the “critique of capitalism has faded in significance”; in reaction, she’s “sort of reviving a Gramscian-style Marxism.” She describes global warming as “sort of, like, a crisis, in the human relationship to nature?” and as “a natural result of the human alienation from nature under capitalism.” She cites several authorities who speak of “a sort of, like, physical or spatial alienation?” but adds that she intends to go beyond them.
It soon becomes obvious that these young people are, for the most part, smart upper-middle-class kids, probably from the suburbs, with little real-world experience and even less in the way of serious education. It’s clear that their familiarity with history, literature, philosophy, or any other traditional field of learning is at best rudimentary. What they have is ideology and the jargon to go with it. And they have the arrogance of innocents who really have no clue how little they know. One after another of them pronounces with an imperial air of authority on things about which they plainly know next to nothing.
I find my heart going out to them. They’ve been trained to parrot jargon, to regurgitate bullet points about Western imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism—and to think that this is what it means to be educated. After spending a couple of days listening to them, I can see how easy it must have been for these kids—who have never known any other critical language—to pick this one up and mimic it. Indeed, once you’ve gone to a few of these sessions, you discover that you can do the same thing with ease yourself. You don’t need to have actually learned anything, and it certainly has nothing to do with actual social or cultural analysis.
What makes the whole thing unfortunate is that some of these young people have reasonably worthy topics that they want to explore. But they’re prisoners of a mind-set and jargon that make it all but impossible for them to say anything fresh or insightful about their experiences and observations. They’ve been trained to reduce the rich complexities and ambiguities of human life to simple formulas about oppressors and oppressed, capitalists and workers, Western imperialists and their non-Western victims. And when they encounter a reality that doesn’t fit this paradigm, they don’t know how to deal with it, other than to make statements that are demonstrably untrue. Nor do they realize how America-centric they are: despite their rote anti-American rhetoric, most of the things they have to say only make even the remotest kind of sense within an American context.
Then there’s the disorienting admixture, in many of these kids’ presentations, of ludicrously pretentious postmodern jargon and an informal, semiliterate English, full of “likes” and “you knows” and “kind ofs” and mispronounced words (in the midst of all his fancy academic rhetoric, young Stephen pronounces analogous “an-AL-o-jos”) that seem more appropriate to a high school cafeteria than a professional conference. Indeed, the whole event is suffused by a surprising callowness, a lack of the kind of mature professional discipline that I had assumed all grad students still learned to practice, despite the ideological sea change of the last generation or two. (It is not irrelevant that when I showed up to register on the first day of the Cultural Studies Association Conference, I was the only male wearing a suit jacket; I quickly stuffed it into a bag.)
Once upon a time there was something called history. And something else called philosophy. And there was also literature, and with it came literary scholarship, literary history, and literary criticism. And there were art and music, and, to complement them, art history and music criticism and so forth. All these fields of inquiry, and others, fell under the umbrella term “humanities,” or “arts and humanities” (the “arts” part included art and music, “humanities” the rest). The word humanities came into common use in the mid-twentieth century and designated a sphere of intellectual inquiry that, strictly speaking, was not to be confused, on the one hand, with the arts, which were about pure creativity, or, on the other hand, with the social sciences, such as sociology, economics, and political science, which, like the natural sciences (among them biology, chemistry, and physics), sought to establish hard facts by means of statistical research and the like.
By contrast, the humanities allowed for subjective reactions and interpretations: no single analysis of the Iliad or judgment about the root causes of the Civil War would ever be universally recognized as definitive and all-encompassing; the humanities were not about data, formulas, and equations, but rather about pursuing an open-ended conversation in which there was always the possibility of fresh insights and perspectives. In the broadest sense, the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities all shared a single focus—the meaning of human existence—but while the sciences sought to quantify reality, the humanities concerned themselves with ultimately unquantifiable experiences, observations, responses, and interpretations.
In the late 1970s I was an undergraduate English major at a large state university; in the early 1980s I was a graduate student in the same subject at the same school. Though the department in which I studied was generally considered one of the best in the country, and was indeed excellent in many respects, by my final year of graduate study I had grown cynical about certain aspects of the academy and decided I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in it. In the classroom there was noble talk about the beauty of poetry, the incomparable value of belles lettres as an ornament of civilization, and the solemn obligation of the scholar to produce and preserve reliable texts of the great works of literature and the profound duty of the critic to separate the wheat from the chaff. Meanwhile the corridors and faculty lounges swarmed with ruthless young careerist professors on the make and cynical older professors who were jaded by the whole game and desperate to retire.
It was, in short, no golden age. But in the midst of it all there were still the humanities at (or close to) their finest—the literature, the expertise, the learning. Several of my professors were first-rate, though their critical methods varied dramatically. I took a number of courses, for example, with the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Louis Simpson, who, in one class meeting that I still recall vividly, leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk, sighed, “Ah, what to say about this book?”—the book, which he then riffed through absently, was Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—and for the next hour and fifteen minutes mesmerized us (or me, anyway) with what, for all its eloquence and incisiveness, came off as an utterly casual, effortless, and off-the-cuff account of the novel, how it affected him as a reader and how Woolf had managed to achieve that effect. Simpson (who in 1975, improbable as it sounds nowadays, had made the bestseller lists with a book about Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams) was nothing less than brilliant. This, I remember thinking, is why I came to college. I suppose you would call him an impressionistic critic.
There were other approaches. Richard Levin, an expert in Elizabethan drama, taught us how to look at the plays of that period as if through a microscope, outlining their multiple plots and understanding how they were woven together to contribute to the works’ overall impact. And there were the New Critics, who showed us what made great poems great by going through them line by line, examining and relishing the subtleties of language. All these methods, however different, went hand in hand—for they were all about appreciating the work. None of these teachers ever forgot that we were all there for one reason: because we loved literature and wanted to understand better what made us love it. We were acolytes, not priests.
That was what the humanities were about—then.
There were, to be sure, warning clouds on the horizon. One or two professors in the department, for instance, practiced the chic, relatively new activity known as deconstruction, which had come over from France by way of the Yale English department. I steered clear of them. It didn’t take an extensive look at the major works of deconstructionist criticism—from its founder, Jacques Derrida, and its chief American exponent, Paul de Man, on down—to realize that this stuff just wasn’t for me. The pretentious, jargon-filled rhetoric, which seemed designed to diminish great authors and their writings while exalting the deconstructionist himself, had nothing whatsoever to do with the reasons why I had been drawn to the study of literature. Indeed the whole enterprise was entirely unconnected to the appreciation of aesthetic or literary value.
But deconstruction was only the beginning. At some point, something called the New Historicism also entered the scene. It, too, left me cold, and for essentially the same reasons.
Then there was feminist criticism. The idea, I gathered, was that all of Western literature had been written by authors unconsciously imbued with notions of male superiority that had warped their views of humanity—and that the literature therefore had to be examined anew through the eyes of the modern women’s movement. It was while I was a graduate student that the faculty members in my department began to debate whether it should permit the teaching of feminist criticism or not. The feminists won.
After I received my Ph.D. I left the academy, and was increasingly glad I had done so. For as the years went by, the discipline in which I had earned my degree looked less and less like what it had been, and more and more like some grotesque parody of academic activity. The idea of aesthetic merit, which had been at the heart of the whole thing, all but evaporated: increasingly, even the greatest literary works were treated as mere texts that had no more or less intrinsic value than a phone book or shopping list.
At the same time, similar developments were taking place in English departments across the nation. And not just in English departments; much the same thing was happening throughout the humanities. Once upon a time students had majored in English because they’d loved reading; or they’d studied philosophy because they loved grappling with ideas about the meaning of life; or they’d studied history because, well, they loved history. If you went into science, including social science, it was because you were interested in learning and discovering hard facts about the nature of the universe or the human animal; if you went into the humanities, it was because you were interested in exploring ideas, values, and questions of character and developing your aesthetic taste and critical judgment. The idea was to learn how to use language to formulate subtle perceptions about life, to capture the complex tensions of a historical moment, to convey your own innermost feelings or describe your most intimate relationships.
All this had been jettisoned. The humanities had been, above all, human—but now, in the name of the dreadful project known as postmodernism, they were replaced by something dehumanized, artificial, mechanical. While old-fashioned analytical philosophy, which had viewed itself as a search for truth, struggled on, it became increasingly overshadowed by fashionable new philosophical approaches (often headquartered not in philosophy departments but in English and other disciplines) that preached that there was no such thing as objective truth. Meanwhile history was corrupted by a new hostility toward the West and toward master narratives centering on great, pivotal figures (too often male and white), and by a new tendency to reduce the rich drama of the human story to a series of dreary, repetitious lessons about groups, power, and oppression. As for English students, instead of learning to appreciate the genius of great authors, they were being told that there was no such thing as genius or greatness. Literary works were now simply fields on which to play language games and wage political battles that had little or no intrinsic connection to the works themselves. Graduate students in English who once would have learned to perform “close readings” of literary texts, which enhanced their understanding of the ways in which a skillful use of language and structure creates an aesthetic effect, now learned absolutely nothing about such matters. Instead they were trained to mimic their teachers’ vapid rhetoric about, as Daphne Patai puts it in the book Theory’s Empire, “subversion, demystification, transgression, violence, fissures, decentered subjects, fragmentation, dismantling master narratives, and so on.”
These activities were all self-referential dead ends—closed systems that had nothing to do with anything beyond themselves. Though they pretended to be politically radical, they had as little connection with the politics of the real world as with the aesthetic values of the works supposedly under consideration. The whole enterprise, briefly put, was intellectually barren. It posed as political, even revolutionary, but it was all just lingo, jargon, shop talk. As Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, has put it, the verbiage of the postmodern humanities is nothing more than “catechism learning,” a set of “axioms to be assimilated before one is inducted into the professoriate.” Once you’ve picked it up, you’re ready to go: you don’t need to do any in-depth research or critical thinking; all you need to do is to keep slinging the same rhetoric.
What exactly is postmodernism? The Canadian poet David Solway has explained it just about as succinctly as is humanly possible. After complaining (justifiably) that the word “has come to mean just about anything we want it to mean”—that it has “become a cowcatcher term sweeping all query and objection before it,” a word that “punctuates the longueurs of flaccid thinking and insecure conceptualizing”—Solway sets out “to chart the etiology of [the] cognitive disease” known as postmodernism. He traces its roots to the anthropologist Franz Boas, who, in an effort to study exotic cultures without prejudice, found it useful to take the position that no culture is superior to any other. Thus was born the notion of cultural relativity, which also informs the works of other pioneering anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.
What these thinkers, along with such pivotal figures as the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, have in common is that they rejected, or at least cast doubt on, “the universality of Western norms and principles.” This “caustic suspicion,” writes Solway, “has gradually but decisively penetrated into the zeitgeist of the West, culminating in the amorphous yet potent cultural amalgam of postmodernism”—the conviction that “[w]e live in a world without reliable truths or transcendent possibilities, without epiphanies, without absolute values, without teleology and without durable meanings.” What follows from this—and what makes postmodernism so decadent and so dangerous—is that it compels one (for example) to reject the universality of such values as individual liberty and to believe that “[t]here are no barbarians, only different forms of civilized man.”
In retrospect, it eventually became clear to me that the period during which I had studied English had been a time of revolution in humanities education. In his 2007 book, Education’s End, Yale professor Anthony T. Kronman would describe the transformation I had experienced as the second of two major shifts in the history of American higher education. In the infancy of American colleges and universities, a period Kronman called the “age of piety,” professors had focused on the Greek and Roman classics and on instruction in the Christian faith, the goal being to provide a “moral and spiritual education” that would illuminate for students the meaning and purpose of human life. In the first great shift, which took place after the Civil War, this “age of piety” gave way to an “age of secular humanism,” when the larger questions about the meaning of human life that had formerly been at the center of all higher education became the special province of the humanities—namely, “literature, philosophy, history, classics, and the fine arts.”
For Kronman, this period—during which higher education in America became democratic “to a greater degree than at any other time or place in human history”—was a golden age during which humanities departments were not simply focused on “the transmission of knowledge” but were also forums “for the exploration of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works of literary and philosophical imagination that we have inherited from the past.”
Separate departments of philosophy first started to appear in the 1880s; English departments began to be founded soon afterward, followed by departments of German, French, and other foreign languages. While these developments were under way in the humanities, another major area of study, the social sciences, was taking shape alongside the natural sciences. While sharing the humanities’ concern about observing and analyzing human society, social scientists strove to approach the subject by means of analytical methods that would be as objective as possible, as opposed to the more subjective approaches found in the humanities.
The second shift—the one I witnessed as a student of English—had its roots in the developments of the late 1960s. Mainly in response to student activism, the “age of secular humanism” began to give way to a third phase during which the humanities ceased to be concerned with larger questions about life. If during the “age of secular humanism” the humanities had sought to help students in their quest to understand the common condition of humankind, in this new phase the humanities questioned the very notion of human nature and replaced it with the assumption—influenced by such postmodernists as the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84)—that our thoughts about human behavior, our statements about the nature of man, and in fact all ideas of whatever kind are nothing more or less than assertions of power. (We will return to Foucault at greater length in the chapter on Queer Studies, which Foucault helped shape, and which, in the form of Queer Theory, has in turn infiltrated all the other “identity studies” to a greater or lesser degree.)
At the same time, humanities professors, envious of the certitude that their colleagues in the natural and social sciences were able to attain as the result of research, began to impose upon the humanities a “research ideal” that was at odds with the traditional essence of the humanities—thereby, in Kronman’s words, “trad[ing] a valuable and distinctive authority for one based upon values they can never hope to realize to anything like the degree their colleagues in the natural and social sciences” could. As the traditional modes of contemplating the meaning of life were abandoned, moreover, they were replaced by New Left politics and by a relativistic, nihilistic mode of thought that denied the very reality of aesthetic merit and objective truth. The very values that the humanities had previously exalted were now disparaged as weapons in an ongoing struggle by straight white Western males to retain power, preserve oppression, and keep capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist systems in place.
Once, the humanities had been concerned with the true, the good, and the beautiful; now they were preoccupied with an evil triumvirate of isms—colonialism, imperialism, capitalism—and with a three-headed monster of victimhood: class, race, and gender oppression. Once, the purpose of the humanities had been to introduce students to the glories of Western civilization, thought, and art—to enhance students’ respect, even reverence, for the cultural heritage of the West; now the humanities sought to unmask the West as a perpetrator of injustice around the globe. Once, the great poets, authors, philosophers, historians, and artists of the Western canon had been heroes whose portraits and statues adorned university campuses; now they were to be viewed with a jaundiced eye—for most of them were, after all, Dead White Heterosexual Males, and therefore, by definition, members of an oppressive Establishment.
As the post-sixties era wore on, deconstruction proved to be the harbinger of a much larger and more amorphous creature called Theory, which addressed itself not only to literary works but to texts of all kinds as well as to every imaginable variety of cultural phenomenon, high or low—TV sitcoms, roller derby, line dancing, porn—and which, drawing on a range of ideas from sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and political philosophy, was fixated on the idea that texts were unstable. Yet despite its heady pedigree, it must be said that the use of the word theory to describe what humanities professors have been practicing for the last generation or so is wildly misleading: what these professors are doing is not theoretical in any remotely scientific sense; what they are doing, rather, is pulling handfuls of jargon out of an ideological grab bag and tossing them at whatever cultural or artistic phenomenon they are pretending to analyze.
The point of this activity, which is not unlike slapping a political sticker on a signpost, is not to tease out the secrets of artistic mastery but simply to “prove”—repetitively, endlessly—certain facile, reductive, and invariably left-wing points about the nature of power and oppression. In this new version of the humanities, all of Western civilization is not analyzed through the use of reason or judged according to aesthetic standards that have been developed over centuries; rather, it is viewed through prisms of race, class, and gender, and is hailed or condemned in accordance with certain political checklists.
The result is what John M. Ellis, author of Against Deconstruction, calls the “theory cult,” whose members, he suggests, can be recognized “not by their analytical skill but by the standardized qualities of their attitudes,” and who in all their “work” go “through similar motions to come to similar conclusions.” “Theory,” Ellis contends, is not “about exploration but about conformity,” and its arcane language “identifies those who speak it as insiders and those who do not as old-fashioned outsiders who lack the required level of sophistication” even as it “serves as a protective device in that its remoteness from ordinary speech camouflages triviality or absurdity.” Ellis notes that the “titles of conference papers” by members of the theory cult “are full of verbal tricks and gyrations”—though, as we shall see in the course of this book, one might more correctly say that they offer endless variations on the same old tired verbal tricks and gyrations. As Patai and Wilfrido Corral point out in Theory’s Empire, the practitioners of Theory “have managed to adopt just about every defect in writing that George Orwell identified in his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language.’”
One of the leading critics of postmodern humanities education is Alan Charles Kors, a veteran professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual history and is the editor of the monumental four-volume History of the Enlightenment. Kors is also the cofounder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization whose declared mission is “to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities.” When, over lunch in Philadelphia in the spring of 2010, I asked him which books, in his view, had most influenced the way in which the humanities are taught today, he answered readily, saying that three specific works were responsible “nearly in toto” for the political mentality that undergirds the humanities today: Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In order to get a clearer picture of the way today’s humanities students are being taught to think, it will be useful to take a brief look at each of these works.
Born in 1891, Antonio Gramsci was a Sardinian Marxist who cofounded the Italian Communist Party in 1921 and was imprisoned by Mussolini from 1926 to 1934. (He died in 1937.) The thirty-three notebooks he kept during his years behind bars are his principal legacy. He is especially celebrated for his introduction of the concept of hegemony, which occupies a central place in the humanities today. Hegemony is an extremely useful notion for critics of democratic capitalism, because it enables them to make that system sound worse than totalitarian dictatorship.
The premise is this. In a country such as those run by Stalin and Hitler during Gramsci’s own lifetime, government power is palpable, explicit, naked. It is clear that the people living under such a system are not free. In a country like today’s United States, by contrast, people think they are free. But according to Gramsci, that freedom is an illusion. They, too, are oppressed. The difference is that the power that keeps them in line is invisible. Indeed, to a large extent the people themselves are the unconscious instruments of their own oppression—for they have unwittingly internalized, and unwittingly obey, the unwritten rules by which their supposedly free society operates. This unseen structure of power, in Gramsci’s view, is even more potent than the structures of power in a totalitarian dictatorship, precisely because its invisibility makes it harder to recognize and therefore harder to resist. Thus people living in America today are even less free than were the people who lived in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The inanity of all this is obvious. America has no death camps, no secret police arresting enemies of the people in the middle of the night and spiriting them away to places where they are tortured, held clandestinely for years, and/or executed without trial. But the patent absurdity of Gramsci’s concept did not prevent post-sixties humanities professors from making it a centerpiece of their political philosophies. The idea of hegemony provided American professors with a language in which to denounce the democratic West, and especially America, as the very essence of evil—this at a time when the gulags were still in business and Mao was murdering millions.
On to Paulo Freire, who was born in 1921 in Recife, Brazil, studied law and philosophy, and then worked, in turn, as a teacher of underprivileged children, a government official, and a university administrator. In the latter capacity, he organized a program to teach illiterate laborers to read and write, an act for which he was imprisoned. After his release, he lived in Bolivia and Chile and worked for the United Nations. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968, brought him international renown. In 1980, after stints at Harvard and with the World Council of Churches, he returned to his homeland, where he became active in the Workers’ Party and ended up as secretary of education for the city of São Paolo. He died in 1997 but remains a major influence on pedagogy throughout the Western world.
In an incisive 2009 essay for City Journal, education expert Sol Stern sums up Freire’s doleful impact on American education, noting that since the 1970 appearance of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English, the book “has achieved near-iconic status in America’s teacher-training programs.” It is “one of the most frequently assigned texts” in “Philosophy of Education” courses at top education schools; when Stern met recently with participants in the New York Teaching Fellows program, he found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed was “the one book that the fellows had to read in full.”
To read this alleged classic of education is a stunning experience—for it turns out to be nothing but one long stretch of Marxist agitprop that has nothing useful whatsoever to say about actual teaching. As Stern observes, it
mentions none of the issues that troubled education reformers throughout the twentieth century: testing, standards, curriculum, the role of parents, how to organize schools, what subjects should be taught in various grades, how best to train teachers, the most effective way of teaching disadvantaged students. This ed-school bestseller is, instead, a utopian political tract calling for the overthrow of capitalist hegemony and the creation of classless societies. Teachers who adopt its pernicious ideas risk harming their students—and ironically, their most disadvantaged students will suffer the most.
Indeed, Freire rejects conventional education as, in his own words, a process of “narration” and a “practice of domination” in which students are obliged to “memorize mechanically the narrated content” and are encouraged to think of themselves in an “individualistic” way and not “as members of an oppressed class.” Freire’s world is one populated solely by the “oppressors” and the “oppressed,” and in his book he does little more than insist repeatedly that the “oppressed” should not actually be taught, in the old-fashioned sense, but should rather be helped to recognize their own “oppression” and encouraged to resist it.
In short, they should be subjected to what in the 1960s went by the name of consciousness-raising. Freire also insists repeatedly that “the pedagogy of the oppressed . . . must be forged with, not for, the oppressed . . . in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity”; that both teachers and students must be “simultaneously teachers and students”; and that a “revolutionary leader” (for at some point in the book, he ceases, for the most part, to label the figures he is talking about “teachers” and “students” and instead begins talking about revolutionary leaders and the revolution’s foot soldiers) should be not a “master” but a “comrade.” Needless to say, what Freire is talking about here is not pedagogy but propagandizing—intellectuals “teaching” the masses about the latter’s own lives and “liberating” them from their “false perception,” thereby turning the students into “Subjects [which Freire capitalizes] of the transformation.”
What Freire has to offer, then, is a program not of education, or of liberal reform, but of indoctrination in the name of revolutionary “liberation.” He defends violence and terror by redefining them: oppression itself, he argues, is violence and terror; for the oppressed to resist it actively, in however bloody a manner, does not constitute violence or terror, for “[v]iolence is initiated by those who oppress” and “[i]t is not the helpless . . . who initiate terror” but their oppressors. His book is packed with words that have become familiar slogans in the humanities today: dialogue, communication, solidarity. He is an open admirer of Lenin, whom he approvingly cites to the effect that “[w]ithout a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
He is also a fan of Mao: it is no coincidence that his book—published in the midst of China’s Cultural Revolution, during which countless practitioners of traditional pedagogy were murdered—emphasizes the importance of “cultural revolution.” (Indeed, Freire explicitly hails Mao’s actions, which, he makes clear, are consistent with his own “educational” program.) Freire likewise celebrates Fidel Castro, calling “Castro and his comrades . . . an eminently dialogical leadership group” who “identified with the people who endured the brutal violence of the Batista dictatorship.” The Cuban Revolution, Freire writes,
required bravery on the part of the leaders to love the people sufficiently to be willing to sacrifice themselves for them. It required courageous witness by the leaders to recommence after each disaster, moved by undying hope in a future victory which (because forged together with the people) would belong not to the leaders alone, but to the leaders and the people.
And let’s not forget Che Guevara, whom Freire quotes at reverential length, eulogizing the bloodthirsty Argentinean for his “communion with the people,” his “almost evangelical language,” and his “deep capacity for love and communication.” Freire does note that Guevara’s own experience showed that some oppressed people’s “natural fear of freedom may lead them to denounce the revolutionary leaders” and even to desert or “betray . . . the cause,” and that Guevara “recogniz[ed] the necessity of punishing the deserter in order to preserve the cohesion and discipline of the group.” This would seem to be Freire’s euphemistic way of acknowledging Guevara’s mass execution of those whom he considered insufficiently attentive “students” of his “pedagogy.”
As Stern points out, Freire’s “declaration in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that there ‘was no such thing as a neutral education’ became a mantra for leftist professors” of the 1970s and thereafter “who could use it to justify proselytizing for America-hating causes in the college classroom.” Even the literary critic Gerald Graff, a star of the PC academy and certainly no conservative, has deplored Freire’s influence, asking: “What right do we have to be the self-appointed political conscience of our students?” Stern underscores one irony: that Freire’s approach to education hasn’t been taken up at all by his “favorite revolutionary regimes, like China and Cuba,” where “the brightest students are controlled, disciplined, and stuffed with content knowledge for the sake of national goals—and the production of more industrial managers, engineers, and scientists.” No; only in the West have students been led down Freire’s primrose path.
Then there’s Frantz Fanon. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon became a psychiatrist, worked in Algeria during the rebellion against the French, and died of leukemia in 1961 in a Washington, D.C., hospital. The Wretched of the Earth was published that same year with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, who sums up the book’s basic dichotomy: over here the people of the West, who are by definition colonizers and therefore evil, and over there the non-Western “natives,” who are by definition exploited colonists and are therefore virtuous.
This tidy world picture ignores the fact that many Western nations have never been colonial powers and that many non-Western nations have. Fanon’s worldview leaves no room for, say, non-Western powers that have sold people into slavery or oppressed women. Indeed his ideas about European imperialism and non-Western colonial subjects, and of the relationship between the two, are based entirely on his experiences in Algeria, which are not necessarily representative of anything. Yet he serves up a book full of generalizations that are plainly meant to apply to every colonial or postcolonial situation. In his world, Western “settlers” are always aggressors, non-Western “natives” always victims.
He makes ludicrous blanket statements about revolution, idealistically predicting that non-Western “natives” who carry out wars of “liberation” from Western colonial powers will then proceed to establish harmonious governments in which they will not allow themselves to be oppressed by their own, for they will have learned better: “When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as ‘liberators.’ They [will] take good care not to place their future, their destinies or the fate of their country in the hands of a living god.” He further assures us that “[t]he African people and indeed all under-developed peoples, contrary to common belief, very quickly build up a social and political consciousness.” Indeed, after a revolution by the non-Western colonial subjects of Western powers, “the people [will] join in the new rhythm of the nation, in their mud huts and in their dreams. Under their breath and from their hearts’ core they [will] sing endless songs of praise to the glorious fighters.” They will, furthermore, “proceed in an atmosphere of solemnity to cleanse and purify the face of the nation. . . . In a veritable collective ecstasy, families which have always been traditional enemies [will] decide to rub out old scores and to forgive and forget. There [will be] numerous reconciliations. Long-buried but unforgettable hatreds [will be] brought to life once more, so that they may more surely be rooted out.” It is curious that while the history of postcolonial Africa has proved Fanon’s predictions spectacularly wrong, he continues to be regarded in the West as an oracle.
Like Freire, moreover, Fanon writes sympathetically about the violence of “natives,” arguing that it
constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning. . . . At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.
Fanon also shares Freire’s high regard for Castro, who, he writes, “took over power in Cuba, and gave it to the people.” America, he laments, “has decided to strangle the Cuban people mercilessly. But this will be difficult. The people will suffer, but they will conquer.” Such empty sloganeering is ubiquitous in The Wretched of the Earth.
Far from encouraging the creation of wealth and stability by building up a middle class in former colonies, Fanon insists that “it is absolutely necessary to oppose vigorously and definitively the birth of a national bourgeoisie and a privileged caste.” Indeed, he calls for the stamping out of whatever bourgeoisie does exist “because, literally, it is good for nothing”—it “express[es] its mediocrity in its profits, its achievements and in its thought” and “tries to hide this mediocrity . . . by chromium plating on big American cars, by holidays on the Riviera and week-ends in neon-lit night-clubs.” That’s right—Fanon calls not for expanding the bourgeoisie but for destroying it, because “the bourgeois phase in the history of under-developed countries is a completely useless phase,” and “[r]ich people . . . are nothing more than flesh-eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people’s blood.”
Fanon’s prescription for postcolonial society echoes Freire’s: “We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their brains, fill them with ideas, change them and make them into human beings. . . . [P]olitical education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence; as [leftist Martinican writer Aimé] Césaire said, it is ‘to invent souls.’” In short, non-Westerners are not “human beings” and do not have “souls” until “we”—the good Westerners—fill their heads with political philosophy. Fanon does not hide the fact that he is talking here about indoctrination in left-wing collectivist ideology: “the leaders of the ring realize that the various groups must be enlightened; that they must be educated and indoctrinated; and that an army and a central authority must be created.”
The fantasy-spinning continues: “The masses should know that the government and the party are at their service. . . . Nobody, neither leader nor rank-and-file, can hold back the truth. The search for truth in local attitudes is a collective affair.” And: “The nation does not exist except in a programme which has been worked out by revolutionary leaders and taken up with full understanding and enthusiasm by the masses.” It is striking to read this dangerous drivel—so thoroughly disconnected from reality—alongside somebody like Orwell, who was a genuine student of human nature and who recognized the catastrophic foolishness of such delusions.
Gramsci, Freire, Fanon: these three men’s influence on the teaching of the humanities today has been nothing less than a disaster. They’ve infected it with contempt for the West, which is identified not with freedom and prosperity but with capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism—all of which are seen as unmitigated evils. Meanwhile left-wing collectivist systems, however horrendous their track records, are presented as worthy of admiration. (It is common in the humanities today to refer, as Fanon does, not to “democracy” and “Communism” but to “capitalism” and “socialism.”) Whereas American humanities education once focused on introducing students to the great achievements of Western civilization and to the universal values that make it unique in human history, the goal now is to discredit the West’s legacy. In humanities departments today, it is an article of faith that all civilizations are equal—except for Western civilization, which, students learn, is unique only in the degree of its greed, brutality, and lust for power.
There are, of course, dozens of other figures—most of them European, many of them French, and nearly all of them, curiously, members of that otherwise discredited species, the Dead White Male—who have exercised a major influence upon the humanities today. We can begin with the fathers of social science, Karl Marx and Max Weber (author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) in Germany and Émile Durkheim in France, the latter two being the founders of sociology; and with the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács. A group of several German Marxists who thrived between the world wars and who are called the “Frankfurt School” because of their association with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research—among them Max Horkheimer; Theodor Adorno; Walter Benjamin, author of the influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; and Herbert Marcuse (“father of the New Left”), an idol of both Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis who lived to support the Viet Cong—had an immense impact on postmodern literary criticism.
There are other important Marxists, such as Louis Althusser and Frederic Jameson, as well as several writers who are categorized as structuralists (though some later graduated to poststructuralists) because of their preoccupation with the idea of language as a system of signs: Ferdinand de Saussure, the germinal Swiss semiotician who introduced the popular terms signified and signifier; Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French father of modern anthropology; the psychologist Jacques Lacan; and the French author Roland Barthes, who in Mythologies set out to expose what he saw as bourgeois cultural myths. And then there are the poststructuralists, who moved beyond the basic structuralist preoccupation with signs in a variety of directions—among them Derrida, who invented deconstruction, and Foucault and Judith Butler, with whom we will spend some time later.
There is no need at this point to examine most of these writers’ work in detail, or to isolate at length the wide-ranging, and invariably abstruse, ways in which each of them affected the humanities in our time. But there are two men, both Americans (of a sort, anyway), whose role in reshaping the teaching of the humanities we should pause over.
One of them is Edward Said (1935–2003), whose major contribution to the humanities today can be summed up in a single word: Orientalism. His 1978 book of that name made Said—who grew up in an affluent Cairo family and later, as a longtime member of the Columbia University faculty, identified himself as a Palestinian—an academic superstar. His book’s thesis is relatively straightforward: that Westerners’ perceptions of Oriental cultures have been shaped almost entirely by generations of Western “experts” who viewed those cultures through Western eyes and whose accounts of them were therefore colored by prejudice and condescension. These “experts,” according to Said, fostered certain romantic, patronizing notions of Oriental cultures that in turn were used to justify colonialism and oppression. Said argued that instead of listening to these “experts,” however knowledgeable, Westerners eager to know the truth about Oriental cultures should listen to Oriental peoples themselves.
Said’s book caused an upheaval in the study of Oriental cultures, especially the Arabic and Muslim cultures of the Middle and Near East. In one fell swoop, it scrapped the credibility of distinguished scholars who had encyclopedic knowledge of those cultures. It also had the effect of silencing criticism by Western academics of even the most egregious aspects of those cultures—for what Western readers took away from Orientalism was the conviction that any criticism by a Westerner of any aspect of a non-Western culture was, by its very nature, illegitimate. Instead of thinking critically about other cultures—that is to say, judging them by Western standards—Westerners should approach even their most disturbing attributes with humility and respect, seeking to understand and sympathize.
The argument of Orientalism lies at the foundation of two insidious and interlocking postmodern disciplines: Postcolonial Studies, which purports to examine the lingering legacy of Western colonialism in various non-Western societies, and Subaltern Studies, which focuses more narrowly on the postcolonial societies of South Asia.
The word subaltern, which was used by Gramsci to describe people oppressed because of their membership in some group or other, was given new prominence by the India-born and largely U.S.-educated Columbia professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a founding document of postcolonialism, the 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” One of Spivak’s major arguments, which has been endlessly recycled in the contemporary humanities, is that when we choose to tell the “real” truth about an oppressed group we run the danger of “essentialism”—that is, of overgeneralizing about the group in question and thereby ignoring the fact that some members of that group, being at the same time members of other groups, experience their own special kinds of oppression that should not be overlooked. Repetitive hand-wringing about this alleged problem constitutes a very large proportion of the “work” done throughout the humanities today.
I will not focus at length in this book on Postcolonial or Subaltern Studies, but it is worth pointing out here that all sorts of countries have been colonies and colonized, and the effect of colonialism on colonies has not always been entirely negative. Yet Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies attend exclusively to Western colonizers of non-Western colonies and consistently view this colonialism as negative, indeed evil, painting all colonizers with the same brush. The supposed purpose of Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies is to give voice to the formerly colonized, who are seen by definition as having been silenced under the colonizers’ sway. This unsilencing supposedly entails washing away as fully as possible the traces of the colonizer and allowing the authentic but long-suppressed voice of the colonized, or subaltern, to ring out—although in fact the most justly celebrated postcolonial authors (such as V. S. Naipaul) have plainly profited by their study of the colonizers’ literature and, more broadly, by their education in the colonizers’ culture.
What Said has done for the Western study of Arabic and Islamic cultures, Howard Zinn (1922–2010) has done for the study of American history. In the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, one sign of the supposedly nonconformist brilliance of the eponymous hero, a drastically underachieving, emotionally troubled young janitor at MIT played by Matt Damon, is his enthusiasm for Zinn’s 1980 book A People’s History of the United States. “If you want to read a real history book,” Damon’s character spits out at one point, “read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass.” The implication here is that Zinn’s book is obscure and noncanonical, the kind of book only an offbeat genius would know about. In fact it is the most influential history of America in our time, selling more than a hundred thousand copies every year. It is virtually impossible to visit an American university bookstore without running across high stacks of copies of Zinn’s book on the shelves of required reading for history courses.
As with Said’s Orientalism, the thesis of A People’s History of the United States is relatively straightforward: namely, everything they told you is a lie, or at best a half-truth. American history, according to Zinn, is nothing to be proud of; on the contrary, it is nothing more than one long, disgraceful record of oppression, genocide, and exploitation. Zinn, a Marxist, did a magnificent job of selectively telling the story of America in such a way as to make it look, indeed, like a trail of horrors. For students with little or no knowledge of history, American or otherwise, Zinn’s book is dangerously powerful propaganda.
What Zinn never tells his innocent young readers is that every country’s past is full of horrors, and that as the histories of countries go, America’s is, in fact, extremely admirable and inspiring. Eager as Zinn is to catalog America’s sins, he is equally eager to dodge the fact that what sets America apart is not its transgressions but its readiness and ability to face up to them, clean up its act, and become more faithful to its founding principles. America had slavery, but so did (and do) many other countries; what makes America special is that it fought one of the bloodiest wars in human history to free its slaves. America’s abiding offense is racism, for which it was routinely attacked by European intellectuals for generations; yet in 2009 America—to the astonishment of European critics in whose eyes American racism was an incurable chronic disorder—became the first Western country to have a black head of state or government. Zinn is a fierce enemy of capitalism, the sins of which he itemizes tirelessly, but he’s equally fierce in his admiration of Marx and Lenin, the fruits of whose ideas—Russia’s gulag, Mao’s Cultural Revolution—he is careful to leave all but entirely off his readers’ radar.
Indeed, both Said and Zinn make a point of dropping down the memory hole the very best attributes of America—those that not only have made America the freest and most prosperous nation in human history, but also have positively transformed much of the rest of the world—while also deep-sixing the monstrous reality of communism. America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution articulated ideas about individual liberty, human rights, and equality that have reshaped human civilization, and America’s example of standing up to one form of totalitarianism after another in the name not only of Americans’ but of other people’s liberty has inspired men and women around the world, bringing to its shores generation after generation of freedom-loving immigrants; but when Said and Zinn allude to these facts, it is only to mock them as sentimental lies.
One of the pillars of “Theory,” and indeed of all postmodern busywork, is a sociological concept that goes by the name of social constructionism. This concept places language at the center of everything, insisting that language is always and intrinsically unstable and that it plays a far more crucial role in life than has ever been recognized. Building on this proposition, social constructionism argues that many aspects of human experience that we ordinarily think of as parts of nature are in reality human constructions, brought into being by the act of naming, and that the primary goal of pedagogy should be to expose this fact and to identify the invariably nefarious reasons why these constructions have been put into place. To put it a bit differently, social constructionism, in essence, exaggerates to the point of absurdity a valid, simple, and commonsensical observation: namely, that some concepts are so much a part of everyday life that we can easily make the mistake of thinking of them as if they’re as natural as the sun, moon, and stars—even though they are, in fact, human inventions, products of the imagination. One example is the concept of money; another is the concept of “king” or “president.”
This is an uncomplicated observation and can also be a useful one. What social constructionism does is to push it farther—exactly how far varies from one social constructionist to another. Some very influential members of the breed take it so far as to argue that certain phenomena that most of us, on reflection, would identify as part of nature, and not merely social constructions, simply did not exist before they were named—so that, for example, there was no such thing as homosexuality before the word homosexual was coined in the late 1800s, no anthrax before Pasteur, and no battered babies until that term was first used in 1962. (Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, in their 1994 book, Professing Feminism, attribute these latter two convictions to the French sociologist Bruno Latour and the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking respectively.)
There are other concepts that figure prominently in the humanities today, and that will consequently figure in this book. Here are some of the more important ones:
• NEOLIBERALISM: After the Berlin Wall came down, some Western academics began to feel a bit self-conscious about condemning capitalism. So instead they started condemning “neoliberalism.” Or, sometimes, “market fundamentalism,” “consumer culture,” “corporatist culture,” or “brand-name culture.” What is being condemned here? Answer: individual liberty, free markets, privatization, deregulation, and minimal intervention by the state in private affairs.
• GAZE: Postmodernism, especially when it takes the form of identity studies, has taken from Jean-Paul Sartre a preoccupation with the “gaze.” The idea is that when another person—the “Other”—looks at you, you’re suddenly aware of yourself as the object of that person’s thoughts, which are out of your control; as a result, instead of feeling free to define yourself, you may experience that person’s “gaze” as exerting power over you, redefining you, robbing you of your right to define yourself. You may even, Sartre argued, feel “enslaved” by the Other’s gaze. In identity studies, such logic is often used to depict harmless glances as despotic acts.
• PROBLEMATIZE: One problem with problematize is that definitions vary considerably. Foucault said problematization was the “totality of discursive and non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of the true and false and constitute[s] it as an object for thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.).” Many use the word in such a way as to suggest that it means “to frame a matter or situation in such a way as to expose inherent problems in it that are not immediately obvious.” In 2000, a contributor to a Women’s Studies message board attempted to illustrate the proper use of the word by saying that to “problematize reproductive choice,” for instance, is to ask: “What are the socio-political/economic conditions that surround the emergence of the concept called ‘choice’?” Other message board contributors suggested that in most contexts problematize could be replaced, without any significant loss in meaning, with discuss.
• INTERROGATE: Traditional readers read books; postmodernists interrogate texts. The idea is that a literary work should not be regarded with unthinking respect and awe, but should rather be approached as if it were a suspect brought in for questioning. The fallacious premise here, of course, is that before postmodernism, nobody read critically or analytically. (One can also, by the way, speak of “interrogating” a concept.) This word, too, can often be replaced with discuss.
• DESTABILIZE: Postmodernists view all forms of discourse prior to postmodernism as being fixed and stable—or as being characterized by an illusion of fixity and stability. In their view, all texts are in fact unstable, incomplete, and ultimately unknowable, as is the world they purport to represent; in their own texts, they seek to underscore these attributes—to frustrate any expectation of, and dispel any illusion of, stability, either in other texts or in the world around them. The premise is that by destabilizing texts, one can keep the reader alert to the instability, uncertainty, and unknowability of absolutely everything.
• INTERVENTION: Critics don’t just write about a text or art work or topic anymore—they intervene in it, a word used because it takes the focus off the work and puts it on the critic, and because it makes it sound as if the critic is actually bringing about some kind of change. When the jacket copy for a recent book of academic criticism described it as “an important intervention in contemporary linguistic and semiotic debate,” “intervention in” essentially meant “contribution to.” Of course, intervene, like problematize and interrogate, can also usually be replaced with discuss.
• REIFICATION: Reification is kind of like abstraction, only in the other direction—in other words, it means viewing (intentionally or not) or treating (deliberately or not) an abstract concept as if it were a material object, or a human creation as a part of nature. The term, which was popular with Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, is obviously popular with social constructionists, since they’re preoccupied with the difference between the natural and the man-made.
There is, needless to say, a lot more jargon where this came from, some of which will come up along the way.
In the age of secular humanism, students were encouraged to think critically and speak for themselves as individuals, to find their own paths in life and form their own tastes, values, and sensibilities. In the postmodern humanities, every person is, by virtue of accidents of sex, skin color, and sexual orientation, a member of a group for whom the rich, delicate complexities of life are reduced to pseudoscientific rhetoric about oppression, collective grievances, experiences of victimhood, and hegemonic power. Indeed, humanities students today learn that all of life is about power, whether economic, political, or social. In today’s world, they’re told, the West holds all the cards (the humanities establishment has yet to acknowledge that this is less and less true), and in the West, straight white men hold all the cards (never mind the post-sixties institutionalization of preferences at almost every level of society for almost everybody but straight white men).
The chief objective of the humanities now is to use “Theory” to uncover the workings of that power, the better to combat it in the name of those groups that are purportedly oppressed. This has proved to be a slippery slope. Once humanities professors decided to embrace a notion of the humanities that had at its center the thesis that straight white Western men are all oppressors, and that all others are victims, the door opened to any number of humanities “disciplines” purporting to address, and redress, the supposed silencing of an increasingly wide range of victim groups. After blacks came women and Latinos, then gays, transsexuals, the disabled, the overweight, and so forth. These and other self-identified victim groups are now the subjects of their own academic fields, which may be said to straddle the humanities and social sciences. Rooted in movements—the civil rights movement, the women’s movement—that were, at least at the outset, reasonable efforts to secure equal rights, these fields of “study” became possessed by a narrow, irrational fixation on alleged patterns of hegemonic power and oppression.
The words race, gender, and class, the holy trinity of humanities studies in our time, are especially crucial in these identity studies disciplines. Much of what is said and written in these fields consists of little more than the ritual recital of these words, the incessant assertion of the paramount importance of these three so-called “categories of analysis.” In every form of identity studies, there are books and articles aplenty in which concern about these categories is endlessly articulated. Recent years have seen the publication of such titles as Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology; Race, Class, and Gender in the United States; Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States; Gender, Race, and Class in Media; Inequality: Classic Readings in Race, Class, and Gender; The Inequality Reader: Contemporary and Foundational Reading in Race, Class, and Gender; Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender; Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective; Prejudice: Attitudes about Race, Class, and Gender. Sometimes sexuality or sexual orientation is added to the triad: Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; Understanding Diversity: An Introduction to Class, Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation; The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality.
When any two or more of these “categories of analysis” come together, you’re dealing with something called intersectionality. Part of the idea of intersectionality is that when you’re “analyzing” oppression, it’s important not to isolate one category but to look at all of them so that you can see how the different forms of oppression work together. This is the thrust of such recent books as The Intersectional Approach: Transforming the Academy Through Race, Class, and Gender; The Intersection of Race, Class, and Gender; Identities and Inequalities: Exploring the Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; and Emerging Intersections: Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice.
The way in which academics today think about intersection is illustrated neatly by Paula Rothenberg, author of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, who writes that “[m]any of us have come to understand that talking about gender without talking about race and class or talking about race without bringing in class and gender is simply another way of obscuring reality instead of coming to terms with it. Many of us have come to believe that using race, class, and gender simultaneously as categories for analyzing reality provides us, at least at this historical moment, with the most adequate and comprehensive understanding of why things occur and whose interests they serve.” Flip through the most popular humanities and social science textbooks, anthologies, and journals published in the last couple of decades and you will find countless variations on these two sentences.
A key tenet of intersectionality is that the oppression experienced by someone who is the object of more than one kind of oppression (say, a black lesbian) is worse, and more complicated, than that experienced by someone who is the object of only one kind (such as a gay white man, a straight black man, or a straight white woman). Being oppressed for one’s identity as black, female, and gay, in other words, is more than just the sum of three different oppressions; it is a distinct experience that needs to be described and understood on its own terms. While much of the rhetoric in the humanities today consists of ritual reiterations of the importance of race, class, and gender, much of it also consists of ritual assertions of the importance of intersectionality—or ritual complaints about an insufficient attention to intersectionality.
For example, at a session called “Bodies in Question” at the 2010 conference of the National Women’s Studies Association, one participant worried aloud that Queer Studies “de-emphasizes the importance of race.” Another fretted that “white queers” don’t think enough about how their whiteness informs their notion of queerness. A third complained that “texts addressing issues of race in Queer Studies are marginalized.” Panelists and audience members spoke of “the critique of whiteness in Queer Studies,” “the intersecting nature of oppression,” and “the multiple ways in which people are oppressed.” It was observed that “white people can position themselves as oppressed” without recognizing the privilege they enjoy on account of their race. “It is important,” we were told, for “queers” who are white “to recognize and interrogate” how their whiteness affects their view of what it means to be queer. In short, the same point was made over and over again, phrased in a multitude of ways, and everybody involved seemed to think that—or at least acted as if—complex ideas and fresh insights were being exchanged.
The mentality engendered by the academic preoccupation with victim groups is reflected in a statement by geographer Gillian Rose in her 1993 book, Feminism and Geography: “In the dominant culture of the West now, a white bourgeois heterosexual man is valued over a black working-class lesbian woman.” Really? In employment decisions? In university admissions? Rose purports to be able to describe the way in which a “white bourgeois heterosexual man perceives other people who are not like him”—from his position of power, she says confidently, he views them “only in relation to himself.” (Note that even as we are expected to accept that a white bourgeois heterosexual man is incapable of perceiving those who are unlike him except in relation to himself, we are expected at the same time to accept that Gillian Rose knows how all white bourgeois heterosexual men think.)
According to the mentality of an ideologically orthodox academic like Rose, all white bourgeois heterosexual men are by definition powerful, while those who are nonwhite, nonheterosexual, and nonmale are by definition powerless. While Rose feels “marginalized in geography as a woman,” she feels obliged to apologize for being “empowered by my whiteness.” She says that although she is a member of the academy, “I still do not feel part of it” because she is a woman with a working-class background who, as a student, never felt “quite as good as the confident bourgeois men (and often women) I studied with.”
Rose is head of the Geography Department at the Open University and has taught at the universities of London and Edinburgh. And yet she genuinely seems to believe that while she enjoys a certain unfair power because of her race, this power is canceled out by her class and gender. In fact, unless the academic settings in which she has worked are bizarre exceptions to the rule, the truth is almost certainly the opposite. In the academy, members of supposed victim groups enjoy considerable privilege. And the more “oppressed” you supposedly are, the more privilege you receive.
On one level, Rose certainly realizes that as a professor at a major university she enjoys a good deal more power than most people—white, male, or whatever. But on another level she seems honestly to think that she is oppressed. So convinced is she of this that it would be useless to try to explain to her that this reduction of human relations to certain ultratidy notions of group oppression results in an outrageously crude picture of the world. If one felt obliged, for argument’s sake, to accept her view that human relations are purely a matter of group power and group oppression, one might at least try to persuade her that plenty of people are oppressed—or ignored, mocked, or looked down upon—for reasons other than race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. What, for example, about the short, old, fat, and unattractive? What about those with psychiatric disorders, chronic illnesses, physical handicaps, mental retardation? What about the bald and bespectacled?
The list can go on and on. One would think that making this point would be a good way of getting people like Gillian Rose to stop thinking in terms of a handful of narrow categories and to look at human experience in a more complex, nuanced way, viewing every person as an individual and every situation on its own terms. No; what has happened is that, as a result of such observations, the number of approved “categories of analysis” has, quite simply, multiplied. So it is that we now have disciplines such as Fat Studies and Disability (or “Crip”) Studies. One particularly striking aspect of a development like Crip Studies is that the language has come full circle. Over the years, beginning around the 1960s, the “correct” label for people with physical disabilities became increasingly “sensitive”—or, at least, that was the idea—and, at every stage, those who had failed to keep up with the latest advances in terminology were taken to task for their insensitivity. So it was that crippled gave way to handicapped, which gave way to disabled, which in turn gave way to terms like physically challenged, differently abled, and handicapable. But what happened then, at the end of this process? Academics “reclaimed” the word cripple, now shortened to crip—restoring to its place of honor the word that had previously been considered the ugliest way possible of describing the thing it refers to.
I have divided this book into chapters, each devoted to a different kind of identity studies. But it must be emphasized that in practice all of these things tend to blend into one another. All of them are preoccupied with race, gender, and class; being (for example) black and gay gives you extra points in Women’s Studies, just as being female and black gives you extra points in Queer Studies. Some of these disciplines, moreover, aren’t always focused on exactly what you expect them to be focused on: look, for instance, at the Feminist Teacher Anthology, a collection of essays from the journal Feminist Teacher, and you can get the impression that Women’s Studies pays at least as much attention to homosexuality as to female gender; meanwhile, Queer Studies, as we shall see, is certainly more interested in “Queer Theory” than it is in homosexual orientation as such. Sometimes it can seem as if specifically gay-related material has been pushed out of Queer Studies by Queer Theory and has settled instead largely in Women’s Studies, thereby, to a considerable extent, pushing out feminism, which, in turn, has bled out into Cultural Studies in a big way.
In the pages that follow I will be focusing on four “identity studies” that, taken together, give a good picture of what postmodernism has wrought in the humanities and social sciences: Women’s Studies (also known as Gender Studies); Black Studies (which also goes by such names as Africana Studies and African American Studies); Queer Studies (not quite the same thing as Gay and Lesbian Studies); and Chicano Studies (nowadays usually called Chicana and Chicano Studies, or—no kidding—Chican@ Studies). I will also devote a separate chapter to several other “studies.”
Stephen wants to have a house someday—a perfectly admirable ambition—yet has been taught to despise (or to profess to despise) his own dream. Mimi, though by all indications a beneficiary of every blessing twenty-first-century American life has to offer, has been imbued by her professors with a reflexive contempt for her country. And Michelle has learned all the Marxist jargon but would appear to be utterly clueless about the nightmarish reality of Marxist societies. These are the children of the revolution—the upheaval in humanities education that brought down the age of secular humanism in the university. Along with all their fellow students of various postmodern “studies,” these young people have been shaped by teachers—or by the students of teachers—who, in their own time, were shaped by the radical politics of the 1960s. Indeed, many of those teachers became teachers precisely because they wanted to help form a new generation of Marxists, anticapitalists, and anti-Americans. Those teachers took on the higher education establishment of their day, with its distinctive approaches and curricula—and they won. What have they done with their victory? Here’s what.