Teaching the Politics of Identity in a Post-Identity Age: Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, I have taught several multicultural/multiethnic literature courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. As a faculty member teaching in a large California regional comprehensive university with a very diverse student body, I faced a number of concerns: How would 1 be able to cover diverse US ethnic literatures in a fifteen-week period'? What approach should I take that would not reduce complex literatures to an academic fast-food menu (it's Tuesday so we will be covering Asian American literature), especially since a number of ethnic studies departments already exist on my campus, and my own English department offers courses such as African American and North American Indian Literatures? Moreover, since nay campus has one of the largest university deaf populations in the country, how would I investigate the complex questions of against changing definitions of cultural groups and the ties that disability studies have to ethnic studies? (1) I decided that my course would concentrate on a theoretical, rather than historical, overview, focusing on shared theoretical concerns about literatures associated with people of color. Such a focus would allow the class to explore questions concerning canon formation, gender, race/ethnicity, class, disability, and sexuality. Examining the complex ways these issues intersect, I raised questions such as the following: What are the consequences of accepting or challenging essentialist definitions of gender and race? How do writers of color confront their often conflicting commitments to multiple subject positions? What are the potential difficulties of constructing an ethnopoetics? How do the current discussions on multiculturalism affect academia and the canon? How do we even decide who are multicultural/multiethnic writers, especially given our increasingly hybrid transnational world? By using such an open-ended approach, I encouraged students to engage in this problem-solving activity with me and to construct additional theoretical questions themselves. More and more, 1 found that one of the fundamental teaching challenges that I needed to confront was how to teach a class on multiethnic literatures in a so-called post-identity age. Initially, multicultural critics, engaging in the early battles of the culture wars, often focused on the expansion of the canon and academic curriculum, attempting to recover and discover writers to incorporate in a more inclusive canon and to give voice to identity-based communities. (2) In more recent decades, feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial critics have raised fundamental questions concerning issues of subjectivity, power, and community, thus challenging the concept of the unitary self. (3) Some critics have asked if such theories, in destabilizing the concept of a unified and coherent identity, have undermined fundamental ways to structure ethnic identity and hence undermined larger political goals toward social advancement for people of color. Other critics have argued that the very anti-foundational process at the heart of the postmodernist enterprise provides a means for an emancipatory politics. (4) More recently, postpositivist realists have argued for a theory that reclaims terms such as objectivity, and realism as a means of invoking social and political judgment. (5) In the midst of this lively debate, I, like many critics and teachers interested in multiculturalism, have examined ways to preserve categories of identities without resorting to an ethnic absolutism and essentialism, and ways to embrace such concepts as multiplicity and hybridity without resorting to a social and moral relativism. At the same time, I understand that these issues extend far beyond academic debates and discourse wars. My students, in going about their daily lives, must contend with the social and political consequences of the material effects of state and national understandings of multiculturalism and diversity. …