College English - Volume 68, Issue 1, 2005

Surveying the current state of our “plural and dynamic multiculturalisms” and directing attention to valuable resources in anthologies and criticism, the author suggests that multicultural studies might now focus more on resistance and creativity in the face of oppression than on oppression itself; more on the multiple intersections and interactions of different groups, positions, and experiences than on single (sometimes essentialized) groups; and more on existing power relations and social inequities, and the structural nature of racism and oppression, than on individual behavior.

An instructor and her student offer complementary perspectives on what happened in a classroom in which reading Toni Morrison opened up nearly intractable resistances to a making and sharing of knowledge in which no one was allowed to take refuge in what Catherine Fox calls “whiteliness” and assume a position outside of others’ knowing while asking those same others to assume the “burden of representation.” Complicating our notion of progressive pedagogy and our assumption that we know what progress looks like, the article suggests, in Jones’s words, “both education’s gifts and its limitations.”

An instructor and her student offer complementary perspectives on what happened in a classroom in which reading Toni Morrison opened up nearly intractable resistances to a making and sharing of knowledge in which no one was allowed to take refuge in what Catherine Fox calls “whiteliness” and assume a position outside of others’ knowing while asking those same others to assume the “burden of representation.” Complicating our notion of progressive pedagogy and our assumption that we know what progress looks like, the article suggests, in Jones’s words, “both education’s gifts and its limitations.

The author describes the issues raised for him by team-teaching a course on the Shoah that aimed to incorporate familial, historical, and rhetorical perspectives. Considering firsthand testimonies, songs written by camp inmates, renderings of others’ stories such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and works of fiction and poetry by writers without firsthand experience of the Shoah, he is ultimately led to wonder whether the stories of those who underwent such experiences stand utterly outside critique and appropriation and may demand of us instead only that we never forget.

Reviewed are The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri; Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West; and Women Writing in India, Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century, edited by K. Lalita and Susie Tharu.