Unsettling Calls for National Unity: The Pedagogy of Experimental Multiethnic Literatures

Abstract

In the wake of the events at the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, calls for national unity in the United States have too often constructed a homogenous and narrow national identity that violently others multiethnic voices and experiences. Combined with the War on Terror, the increasing militarization along the US/Mexico border, and recent challenges to bilingual education and affirmative action, this political trend reflects a deep anxiety over US national identity. Moreover, recent attacks on multicultural curriculum in higher education have come in the interconnected form of the corporatization of higher education, budget cuts in humanities programs, and a conservative backlash against diversity requirements housed in ethnic studies; gender and women's studies; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender programs. In this climate, multiethnic literatures such as Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La The New Mestiza, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and Toni Morrison's Beloved offer invaluable potential to interrogate hegemonic constructs of the nation and reconceptualize both nation and national identity as a contestatory and changing set of categories. In my experience teaching these works, students express a kind of cognitive dissonance when reading such texts. As students perform the myriad shifting reading practices that the texts require, they hone productive tools with which to negotiate the different and sometimes conflicting responses to the literature that circulate within any given classroom space. These same tools can prove invaluable to re-reading narratives of national identity. This essay will first examine how the aesthetics of select multiethnic texts disrupt hegemonic constructs of the nation, and then will explore some pedagogical practices through which students engaged the dissonance produced by those contestatory narratives. One of the key issues this body of works raises is, of course, how multiethnic literature gets defined. In the larger field of literary studies, writing often conventional form, disrupts linear narrative and temporal sequence, mixes mediums and genres, shifts between characters' perspectives and voices, and self-reflexively comments on its form. Many of these aesthetic traits are also found in multiethnic literature, but the latter often questions the degree to which these characteristics are experimental since what breaks conventional form depends on how conventional form itself is defined, a definition which is shaped by historic and contemporary racial politics (see Morrison, Playing). Multiethnic literatures often reveal how meaning production is deeply embedded in the shifting categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nation. Such aesthetics, with a great deal of attention devoted to form, allow for the kind of cross-cultural pedagogy that Bonnie TuSmith calls for, in which multiethnic works are taught as works of art while also being situated within the specific cultural traditions from which they emerge, thus avoiding the reductive homogenization of multiethnic literary and cultural traditions (TuSmith 5). For instance, Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza blurs established boundaries between theory and creative writing, poetry, essay, and autobiography to directly illustrate the thematic links among aesthetics, identity, and nation formation. Anzaldua's imagery illustrates that the violent splitting between cultures and nations is produced though international politics that have very real effects on the mestiza body. (1) Constant textual references to the US and Mexico, San Diego and Tijuana, mark the borders as more than internal divisions of personal identity, but also as external ones between nations that have material consequences for those inhabiting the borderlands: the border is a 1,950 mile-long open wound that not only divide[s] a pueblo, a culture, but also harshly divides the narrator, staking rods in [her flesh] (Anzaldua 2). …