Politics of Possibility by Gary A. Olson Lynn Worsham Henry A. Giroux

Author:Gary A. Olson, Lynn Worsham, Henry A. Giroux [Gary A. Olson, Lynn Worsham, Henry A. Giroux]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317253860
Google: GhgeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T05:05:31+00:00

Notes

1. But Ronell complicates the easy distinction between life and death. To say that the humanist subject has “died” is not to say that it is no longer operational; nevertheless, Ronell insists that humanism is a drug we desperately need to find a way to get off of.

2. I would like to thank my research assistant, Adam Burke, for transcribing this interview from the original tapes.

Staging the Politics of Difference:

Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy

Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham

Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha sees writing, composition, as a “highly political” activity. Writing, defined in its broadest sense, is closely linked to the acquisition of agency. This is why it is important that we not treat writing as a simple medium of communication in which there is some transparent mediation between “already pregiven subjects, pregiven objects, and a preconstituted mise en scène.” For Bhabha, writing constitutes, in a dialogic way, new relationships among these elements and is thus a “continually revisionary,” perhaps even “revolutionary,” activity. And, of course, the connection between writing and agency leads to issues of critical literacy. Bhabha believes that critical literacy is intimately connected to the question of democratic representation. For example, he says in the interview below that “literacy is absolutely crucial for a kind of ability to be responsible to yourself, to make your own reading within a situation of political and cultural choice.” Yet, at the same time we must be cautious not to treat literacy as a panacea or to fetishize it. As Bhabha points out, racism often is the “leading ideology” of the most literate people. Thus, critical literacy in and of itself guarantees nothing, but it is an essential step toward agency, selfrepresentation, and an effective democracy. Consequently, the kind of work we do in composition is extremely important socially, and more institutions need to understand that the work of composition is less about linguistic competence than it is about critical intervention in the world.

The acquisition of agency and critical literacy is linked to another subject central to Bhabha’s project: the role of theory. Theory enables people, both in the academy and in the public domain, to “break the continuity and the consensus of common sense”—to break it and to break into it. As a kind of critical literacy itself, theory helps us “interrupt the dominant and dominating strategies of generalization within a cultural or communicative or interpretational community.” That is, it helps us challenge assumptions, preconceptions, fixed notions; it helps us “deal with processes, subjects, or objects in transition,” not as static entities. For example, postcolonial theory allows us to break into the mastering discourses of sententiousness and colonialism and reminds us that “what was some people’s modernity was somebody else’s colonialism.” It also helps us see boundaries not simply as “the space between one nation and another,” but as a “kind of internal liminal space.” The awareness of sententiousness that critical theory provides underscores, again, the importance of the job of compositionists, for we both help students to “read” the sententiousness in their lives and to “write” from a position of agency.

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