I is an English scholar!

I presented a paper this weekend at a combined Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring/Colorado Wyoming Writing Tutor Conference at Denver University. After the 8 hour drive to Denver, I showed up early Saturday morning to see all these awkward undergrads reading off cue-cards in front of their powerpoints on how to talk nicely to "tutees," and I had one of those "I shaved my legs for this??" moments.

Not that I actually shaved my legs; I didn't shave period, actually. And some of my friends would add that I desperately need a haircut. In any case, I hadn't showered in a couple days either, and I don't think the hurried reapplication of deodorant helped much, either, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyhoo, I spent much of the time sitting in the back, trying desperately to catch up with all my reading. But my session, fortunately, was actually very interesting, featuring intelligent, theory-driven papers and interesting personalities, and the Q&A following was penetrating and forced me to really hone and think through my thesis, which is good, it's what seminars are for, after all. (Tangentially, a good trick to buy you an extra 30 seconds to think in situations like that is to respond, "So, just to make sure I understand your question..."). And when it was over, my most thorough grillers congratulated me on my responses, one guy asked if I was going to publish, and some folks from the Salt Lake Community Writing Center approached me about collaborating on some future research.

So, in the end, it felt like a worthwhile trip, which is good because, unlike last year, I'm not doing another conference this semester. Now if you'll excuse me, I've procrastinated enough on my chronically-behind reading, so here is the hastily written, first-draft paper I presented yesterday afternoon:

“Joyce, Woolf, Post-Colonialism, and Dominant and Marginalized Student Discourses”

TS Eliot, in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” states that “anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year” needs to gain “the historical sense,” that is, “a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” But what happens if one’s historical sense, or tradition, is not European in origin? What if said poet is not a man? With ever increasing numbers of non-traditional students—immigrants, ethnic minorities, lower-income brackets, etc—entering the college nowadays, and consequently having to learn how to write in the academy, the question of a student’s tradition becomes increasingly important.

First some background: In 1968, Brazilian pedagogical theorist Paulo Freire published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, wherein among he states that even well-meaning teachers and writing instructors can inadvertently inculcate patterns of oppression within marginalized students by treating these students like “empty bank accounts,” void of any extracurricular knowledge; in the “bank account method,” students are assumed to be empty vessels to be filled by the teacher, in effect invalidating all the student’s previous experience, knowledge, and even prior education, including thought patterns established within their native discourse (though not recognized by the dominant discourse), and therefore further silencing and invalidating already marginalized discourses. According to Freire, even supposedly revolutionary instructors can fall into this trap of treating students like empty bank accounts. Today, post-Freire, it is generally recognized that what we in college call “correct writing” actually means, in fact, white, male, American, middle-to-upper class writing; that is the dominant discourse, and the field of rhetoric & composition recognizes that our imposition of the dominant discourse upon minority students, ala the bank account method, continues to silence the native discourse of these students.

Some in the field have taken this space opened by Freire to argue for the academies’ acceptance of marginalized discourses. Lee Tonouchi of the University of Hawaii, for example, in 2004, published “Da State of Pidgin Address,” wherein he argued for the recognition of Hawaiian Pidgin as a valid English dialect, with its own internally consistent grammar; he wrote the entire in piece in Pidgin, using phrases such as “Ai-ya. Wot for do? Gotta conference wit da boy, but wot you tell ‘em wen everybody telling him how bad-ass he is,” performing the very acceptance he hopes to see occur in the Hawaiian academy.

In 1996, Puerto Rican Victor Villanueva, of Washington State University, published “Ingles in the Colleges,” wherein he narrates his difficulties as a food-stamp using Vietnam vet slowly climbing through college and grad school, constantly frustrated by his inability to speak the dominant discourse. After much research, he learns how the Arabs, in their contacts with the Byzantine Empire, preserved the philosophic thought of the ancient Greek Sophists, which they in turn carried with them in their eighth-century conquest of Spain. The Spanish eventually drove back out the Moors, but carried this same strain of Sophism with them when they colonized the Americas, including Villanueva’s native Puerto Rico. Villanueva’s native discourse, then, was that of the Greek Sophists, whereas the Anglo-American Academy privileged the discourse of the Latin Romans who colonized ancient Britain. Villanueva’s essay performs his native Sophist discourse, utilizing parallelism, antithetical structuring, amplification, repetition, universals, patterns, and constant digressions. Needless to say, an essay like that is considered a radical experiment in the American academy, even though Villanueva’s native discourse was the preferred style of the ancient Greeks. Villanueva and Tonouchi both seek to demonstrate that marginalized discourses are merely different from the dominant discourse, not incorrect or invalid, yet equally capable of demonstrating intellectual thought.

Of course, the danger with catering to marginalized discourses is that one over-compensates in the other direction, fulfilling Freire’s fear that teachers revolting against the bank-account method might devolve into a laissez-faire, hands-off approach that helps no one. Indeed, my own Dad, a life-long educator, told me that in the late-70s, the fashionable line in education became “Not the sage on the stage, but the guide on the side.” Lisa Delpit reacts against this approach in her 1988 paper “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children.” Delpit discusses African-American educators of the time, who were annoyed by this new hands-off approach, which they perceived as in fact excluding African-American students from the dominant discourse. Delpit argues that white students are already implicitly trained at home in white codes that allow them to navigate the double-speak of white teachers (such as how “do you think it’s time to put the toys away” isn’t actually a question), a training black students aren’t being allowed to attain when they’re just told to speak in their native discourse, a pedagogy that continues to put black children at a disadvantage. “My child already speaks Black,” black parents would protest, “Now teach him white!”

So, then, what do we do now? If we train students in dominant discourses, we are silencing and colonizing marginalized, exploited groups; if we train them in their native discourses, we are excluding them from the dominant power network and again, further colonizing them. How do we navigate between dominant and marginalized student discourses?

One of the ironies of contemporary American English departments is that literature and rhet. comp. students attend the same classes, their professors share the same office space, yet the two fields often fail to talk to each other, which is a shame, because I believe the two fields have a lot to offer each other. Specifically, I would like to situate this rhet. comp. discussion about student discourses within the Post-Colonial discussion occurring in literary analysis. The rhet. comp. discussion I consider to be the microscopic, and the Post-Colonial one the macroscopic, version of the same conversation.

Probably the defining theoretical idea of Post-Colonialism, and the one most insightful for our conversation, is the Post-Structuralist idea of the false binary; the false binary is when two even, homogeneous groups are set up in opposition to each other, men vs women, black vs white, east vs west, dominant discourse vs native discourse, etc. In more colloquial conversation we normally call it a “false dichotomy,” but I actually prefer “binary” because, just as there is a 1 and 0 in computational binary code, whenever we set up a dichotomy, we are immediately privileging one side over the other; our side is the “1” while the other is the “zero.” Like the joke back in ‘04, “Are you voting for Bush, or do you hate freedom?” We are picking white over black, men over women, west over east, dominant over native discourses, just by virtue of framing them as oppositions to each other, as though they should even be opposed to each other. Even if the oppressed decide to switch the binary, and privilege black over white, women over men, east over west, etc, we are still playing the game of binaries, a game constructed by the dominant discourse; the marginalized are still playing by the dominant discourse’s rules.

The false binary, then, is a tool of oppression, used to immediately place the marginalized group in a subordinate position, while constructing an “us vs. them” mentality that lumps all groups different from “us” under the category of “Other” (with a capitol O), as a collective threatening group that must be conquered, colonized, and subjugated in order to ensure the safety of “us,” all while ensuring that all one’s allies are coerced into corralling into a unified, homogeneous whole. Post-Colonialism seeks to expose example of false-binaries in literature, in favor of a more heterogeneous worldview; there are many different subcategories of men, just as with women, and whites, blacks, Latinos, Arabs, rich, poor, gay, strait, and so forth.

Prominent Post-Colonial theorists such as Homi Bhaba and Gayatri Spivak tend to be from former English colonies such as India; India, far from being a homogeneous, unified Other (as they were treated by the British), is made up of many different, regions, caste levels, dialects, and religions, with conflicting interests and concerns. The colonizing English, too, were far from a homogeneous group, being made up of many different regions (Wales, Scotland, etc) and class-levels as well. During the Colonial period the two groups were certainly opposed to each other, but even while enemies their influence on each other was inevitable; India today speaks English as its lingua franca, and has inherited Lockean concepts of individual rights, a free press, and a de-legalized caste system. For better and for worst, the English influence on India has been permanent. And today in England, Indian scarves, spices, teas, immigrants, and literary critics can been seen populating the streets of London. India certainly got the short end of the stick, don’t get me wrong, but their respective discourses have not proved to be so homogeneous, impermeable, and unchangeable as to resist mutual interaction, integration, and assimilation.

What Post-Colonialism proposes, then, is to cease to treat dominant and native discourses as separate and inevitably opposed, but to understand that they are constantly interweaving and influencing each other. Pedagogically, what we must do, then, is not to fret about favoring one discourse over the other as we tutor students, but to assist students in navigating both the dominant and their native discourse. Which again, sounds all well and good, but how exactly do we do that? Another reason I think Post-Colonialism should be included in the conversation is because Post-Colonialists tend to study authors who experimented with this navigation of multiple discourses long before either Tonouchi or Villanueva. I would like to take as my first example a contemporary of TS Eliot, James Joyce.

Vincent Cheng, currently of the University of Utah, wrote a book in 1996, “Joyce, race, and empire,” wherein he argues that far from being some apolitical, avant-garde experimental prosist, Joyce, in everything he wrote, was writing in opposition to the dominant English discourse. Ireland at this time was as colonized and repressed as India, and was on the zero end of the English/Irish binary. In trying to legitimize Irish discourse, he once compared his writing to the illuminations of the medieval Irish Book of Kells, saying, “You can compare much of my work to its intricate illustrations.” And certainly, as opposed to the phallocentric, Romanized, straitforward prose of the English, Joyce’s prose is intricate, interweaving, complex, non-foregrounded, and round-about.

Yet he still wrote in English, and filled his writing with allusions to English writers and Classical writers (Homer, etc), favored by the English literary tradition; and in what other language could he write in? What other writers could he allude to? England had colonized Ireland far longer than it had India; England’s influence was inseparable. Joyce did not oppose English discourse by expunging it from his writing, but rather by acknowledging its impact on his own discourse.

Not just in form but also in content did Joyce navigate his dual discourses in his writing; in his semi-autobiographical “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Joyce-stand-in Stephen Dedelus laments, “How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on the Englishman’s lips than mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech.” English is his second language, yet Irish Gaelic is not his first; he is caught between two second languages. How does he pick between these two competing discourses? Post-colonially, he doesn’t; in another key scene in “Portrait,” he refuses a friend’s offer to join an Irish Language class. Simply favoring Irish over English instead of English over Irish is but to reinforce the false binary; Joyce does not want to switch the binary, but eradicate it. To do so, he refuses to be assimilated into either the Irish or English side, but rather “Portrait” ends with Dedelus, like Joyce, fleeing to continental Europe, seeking a heterogeneous environment where complexity and mutual-influence is acknowledged and encouraged.

Joyce’s solution, then, is also our solution; when faced with a student from a marginalized discourse who doesn’t know how to participate in the dominant one, we do not need to impose ours on them, or give up and just exclude them from ours, nor force them to choose between the two; just the very fact that they are “marginalized,” according to Post-Structuralism, signifies that they are by definition defined by the center, and the center defined by the margins. They are in constant interaction, constantly influencing each other. An easy example is white and black culture in the US; the influence of the two on each other, while clearly still weighted in the white’s favor, has been incalculable. America’s greatest cultural contributions to thee world—blues, jazz, rock, hip-hop, etc—have been from the African-American community, assimilated by the white community. One cannot conceive of an America without the influence of Blacks; or Latinos; or Native Americans; or even the Irish, for that matter (and Saint Patties day, everyone’s Irish). The influence of these discourses on each other should be explored and united, as in Joyce.

How then can we help students navigate discourses if we ourselves don’t recognize them? If their writing appears unconventional, then we might ask what they’re trying to say. Anne DiPardio, in her essay “Whispers of Coming and Going,” discusses a Navajo girl named Fannie who was the first in her family to attend college, and her difficulties in learning college English. The Navajo language takes a fundamentally different approach than English; it is concretized, and connects the speaker to the object spoken of. Needless to say, this does not translate well into English. The Writing Tutor in question in DiPardio’s essay struggled to help this girl express what in her language is inexpressible. It took several sessions and some research for the tutor to understand the nature of these fundamental linguistic barriers the student had to overcome. Basically, it will take some ethnographic research sometimes. Even Joyce was not fully recognized by the English literary establishment as a uniquely Irish writer until the late 20th-century.

This heterogeneity of discourses can be applied to the dominant discourse as well, which is hardly a unified whole, either. For example, my other Post-Colonial example is Virginia Woolf. When I mentioned this to Vincent Cheng, he commended by choice of Joyce but said that Woolf, as much as he loves her writing, “doesn’t have a speck of dirt on her.” She was white, upper-class, and English, and that at a time when England ran half the world. I countered that while all that was true, she was also a woman. (She was also bisexual, but that didn’t come up nearly as often in her writing). And being a woman, no matter how well she had it, she was still colonized, and experienced a different discourse than others. Just as Villanueva inherited a Greek Sophist discourse and Joyce an intricate Irish illumination one, Woolf wrote in vallocentric discourse opposed to the phallocentric discourse of her male peers, one that privileges a sustaining of pleasure across a web of stimuli instead of the linear thrust of male-dominated writing. For example, in her novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” the protagonist, Clarrisa Dalloway, spends the day preparing for a dinner party—it’s a colonized position, for “the voice of the hostess is reluctant to inflict its individuality.” She is constantly being complimented on her hostess abilities, which in turn calls and situates her in her position as subordinate. The cast of “Mrs. Dalloway” is populated with servants, foreigners, veterans, mental patients, and British soldiers returning from India, each in turn either colonizing or being colonized by another. Certainly some—including Clarrisa Dalloway—are in more privileged positions than others, but all, in their way, are being colonized.

I suspect if each of us analyzed ourselves, even the whitest, most male of us wouldn’t fail to find some marginalized discourse we count ourselves a member of. When I first read Joyce’s “Portrait,” I thought it a little conceited of him to write a semi-autobiography after publishing only one collection of short stories; certainly he wasn’t a celebrity meriting a novel by then. But upon further reflection, I’ve realized that if Joyce wanted to adopt a heterogeneous viewpoint, then he could no longer view himself as merely an Irishman; he was Irish, of course, but also a Dubliner, a male, a Conglow graduate, a Modernist, a writer, a former Catholic, and a number of other categories that he himself invented—the only irreducible particular part of his identity was himself. He couldn’t write a novel representing the Irish discourse as though it were a singular, impenetrable unit; he could only write about himself.

So it is with us, so it is with our students; they are not just members of their discourse, they are members of numerous discourses, including parts of the dominant discourse, including a discourse that includes only themselves. We do not impose, we do not exclude, rather, we help them explore, we make them conscious of the forces of discourse that influence how they write, how they think, how they feel.

Also, by situating a rhet. comp. conversation within the Post-Colonial discourse, it adds a certain aura of standing, I think. Sadly, I fear we still fall unconsciously into the trap of treating students from outside the dominant discourse as remedial cases of sorts. They aren’t remedial, of course—they are intelligent, articulate, and often brilliant, simply not in the way we are used to. But no one would dare call Joyce or Woolf remedial; their navigation between dominant and marginalized discourses can serve as a model for us and our students.