Menchu, the story of ALL Guatemalans?

I, Rigoberta Menchu, and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll (1992) refutes elements of the taped testimony and autobiography of Rigoberta Menchu (I, Rigoberta Menchu)  by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (1982). Stoll's central argument is that the Burgos account of Menchu's story served to support the guerrillas because she focused all the blame for the violence (genocide) on the government. Furthermore, Menchu put a human face on a clandestine movement (URNG), but as a Maya, she also validated the guerrilla's claim that their revolutionary movement represented the interests of the indigenous peoples who comprised nearly half of Guatemala's ten million people. So while Menchu went on to earn the Nobel Peace prize and brought international attention to the violence and political unrest in Guatemala, Stoll seems to argue that Burgos' book, in fact,  misrepresented the guerrilla's actual work and the role of the indigenous peoples in the revolution.

It seems that the first place where Menchu is clearly uniting guerrillas and peasants is when the meaning of companeros shifts from villager to guerrilla in the mountains saying "once the Indian opens his heart to them, all those in the mountains will be his brothers. We didn't feel deceived as we did with the army"(204). However, for an Indian to join the guerrillas he has to perform a death ceremony with his family for the purpose of passing on traditions or 'secrets' of the culture. This clearly aligns some Indians with guerrillas, but the question is whether or not the guerrillas were, in fact,part of the unionizing efforts and land rights organizations. Was this, perhaps, just Menchu's experience of intersecting ideologies or was she exploited by the guerrillas or did she exploit indigenous peoples for the guerrillas anti- government campaign?

When Menchu talks about the development of CUC, she says, "when those student, peasant and worker's leaders died together in the embassy, we knew we had an alliance and we looked at how we would confront the policies of the government together"(231). In 1981, this became the 31st January Popular Front to honor those killed in the Spanish embassy on that day; so while she says the CUC incorporates all peasants, she goes on to say "we" used real bombs but also propaganda bombs (233). However, later she decides her role is not with the CUC but another faction of the popular front, one with a Christian foundation saying she would not take up arms: "the people, the masses, are the only ones capable of transforming society"(246). She says she will teach her people to build a people's church not the Catholic church.

Misrepresentation might be the problem of "non-fiction" and testimony -- if only one testimony is given voice, then such an experience is in danger of essentializing a people. Thus, Stoll's efforts in his book to take multiple testimonies and to refute aspects of Burgos' rendering of Menchu's testimony, THE testimony of Indios, seem to be a worthy historical project: the doing of history. In showing the rhetorical function of Menchu's story, Stoll makes visible the rhetoric of modernity. I argue, and Stoll may argue this too as I am not finished with his book, civilians had to be rhetorically aligned with the guerrillas and Rigoberta had to be the face of the revolution (not an armed, male, dressed in fatigues -- a symbol of communism/socialism that prompted the US military support in the 60s/70s) for the Western/colonial forces to take notice and to facilitate peace talks. As it was, the West was not interested in peasant land rights because the allocation of land suited the free market well (e.g., the United Fruit Company).

Tree Girl a young adult novel written by Ben Mikaelsen (2004) complicates Menchu's account as well and seems to support Stoll's argument in that the protagonist, Gabriela Flores, and her Quiche canton do not have any affiliation with the guerrillas or the government. The plot shows how the villagers are careful not to take sides in the conflict despite the guerrillas efforts to say they were helping the canto get land rights and the government checking to see if the Quiche learned Spanish (a sign that the different ethnic Indios were now collaborating) and later outlawing machetes. The protagonist notes how she can tell the difference between the guerrillas and the soldiers (sometimes pretending to be guerrillas to get information) because of the modern weapons (American) they carried. So this story, like Stoll, want to complicate the context of the political unrest and show that the Indios were not necessarily aligned with the guerrilla movement anymore than they were content with the government land policies.I think Grandin's book, The Last Colonial Massacre, does a nice job of presenting the complexity of the Guatemala's political history including all the different revolutionary groups, their leaders, their objectives, and successes with failures -- using several testimonies but a great deal of primary sources.

Stoll clearly indicates that Menchu and Burgos' work brought international pressure for Guatemala to participation in UN sponsored peace talks. Guatemala's civilian government, army, and guerrilla movement signed a peace agreement in 1996.  The international community negotiated with human rights certification and trade packages, but it was Menchu who turned a local situation into a dramatic international symbol (would Mignolo call this rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality?).

Oral testimonies like I, Rigoberta Menchu have become controversial (see my post about Zimmerman's description of testimonio). Indigenous and other marginalized groups are insisting on equality so they are less willing to have their words mediated by outsiders including anthropologists accustomed to speaking and writing on behalf their behalf. (thinking of Linda Tuhiwai Smith who advocates for Maori to write about Maori). Stoll shares his experience coming face to face with Menchu at a conference where he presented Menchu with the "real" account of the death of her brother: "Whites have been writing our history for five hundred years, and no white anthropologist is going to tell me what I experienced in my own flesh" (227). One of facts that Stoll refutes is that Menchu was, in fact, educated and did, in fact, speak Spanish. If this is the case, why, then did Menchu  need Elisabeth Burgos as "the intermediary" who shaped Menchu's story for publication.  Stoll argues that Menchu was sufficiently literate throughout the book and questions why Menchu neglected to tell this part of her story. The question remains of this testimonio (and for the genre more generally) as to who authored the book. If Stoll is arguing that it was Menchu, and that Menchu was indeed literature,  then the question he needs to be asking why Menchu used Burgos as an intermediary -- especially if the taped testimony was not intended to become a book? And if there is a question as to Burgos' faithful rendering of the taped tesimony, that answer can be easily determined by listening to the tapes. Stoll says he listed to 2 hours of it. It seems to me that such an investigation should have been Stoll's first step. Ultimately, Stoll concludes that "contrary to the laureate's occasional statements to the contrary, there is every reason to believe that I, Rigoberta Menchu is her own account of her life" (183).  Burgos who has edited more than one oral testimony says,

The person feels carried away by her voice, her memory, and above all her capacity to improvise. She imagines, but in a true manner, on the basis of events that have happened, such that what is imagined has a real dimension...I have become aware that they relate, as their own experiences, what they could not have witnessed directly, what instead happened in proximity to their own histories. It is not that they act in bad faith, nor that they lie.  Instead, they are moved by a feeling of belonging. This feeling of belonging, of identifying with peoples, occurs when they feel empowered to elaborate their own version of history...It is not the same as reflecting on the basis of writing. The act of telling a story orally requires recreating  what happened through images , it requires setting a stage, like a theater director would, and requires what theater does -- to demonstrate. (199)

Therefore, I think that Stoll's anthropological approach to refuting Menchu's "own story" is ultimately insufficient if we are to understand history. Narratives are already incomplete with gaps and fissures -- whether it is testimonio, autobiography or even an anthropological text. A critical reader knows this and accepts this.

What Stoll could have done with this book was to take more thorough testimonies to examine the narrative process along with exploring the experience being the intermediary. Would he see the imagining that Burgos notices in her storytellers? Stoll admits that this would have been one way to do it-- the comparison of narrative (but I guess that is left for the reader). He wanted to evaluate oral testimony using documents that could set parameters (e.g., land contracts and human rights reports).  But such documents are also partial narratives and such documents are not the work of testimonio nor does testimonio claim to be.Stoll talked to Beverley and George Yudice, literary scholars. Beverley defined testimonio as a story "by a narrator who is also a real protagonist or witness of the event he or she recounts" while Yudice feints it as "an authentic narrative, told by a witness who...portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity" (242). Stoll argues that Menchu's book was not testimonio because it fails the eye witness test, but he seems most upset by our "unfortunate tendency to idolize native voices that serve our own political and moral needs, as opposed to others that do not" (242). I think he is really referring to his refutation as something that does not serve our needs.


 Indeed, readers should step back from any text and weigh reliability, but what is Stoll exactly trying to prove? I think he is trying to expose how I, Rigoberta Menchu was a work of Western rhetoric. Menchu appealed to the Western expectation of native peoples; he argues that Menchu was charming her audience to get a hearing with mythic inflation (232) -- monolingualism, illiteracy, rejection of Western technology. There is a danger of essentializing a people and distorting debates about indigenous issues. I think, based on what I have read and my own conversations with the Maya, that Stoll's secondary argument that Menchu is not necessarily speaking for ALL Guatemalans is more convincing and can at least be argued with claims and evidence.  Is it fair to say that all peasants were ideologically committed to revolution? He writes, "Although some peasants acknowledge being attracted to the revolutionary vision, their moment of decision usually follows the onset of army retaliation. They face a grim choice between surrendering to army killers, escaping to coastal plantations, or casting their lot with the insurgency, if only by staying in a village over which the guerrillas are asserting control" (191-2).

What I, Rigoberta Menchu  does  -- and I think this is Stoll's contribution -- is that it is functions as a "symbol that resolves painful contradictions by transcending them with a healing image," and what that painful contradiction is depends on the beholder. The beholder is the white middle class and the symbol functions to bring the gap between privilege or Western values and its opposite. The symbol identifies a common enemy -- here the Guatemalan army. The privileged and the unprivileged, according to Stoll, can stand on the same side. The symbol is a unifying image.  Imagine, however,  if Menchu would have identified the US government who trained the Guatemalan army in her testimony. (Menchu narrated When Mountains Tremble, when this information was clearly presented; she seemed to know the US role in the genocide, yet she did not talk about the US or use the word genocide in her testimony.)  Menchu was making an argument for peace in her country; she needed to get her story out there, and she seemed to know what story was going to achieve that goal. Her story is both a narrative and an argument, but Stoll wants to say that we are caught up in that argument , privileging a story, and essentializing a people which takes us further from understanding life of Guatemalans.

"Only by establishing chronologies, vantage points, and probabilities can we have any hope of evaluating the reciprocal stories of victimization that are used to justify violence, or how these claims become rationales for larger political interests, or how human beings can be induced into committing mayhem" (274).The concern I hear is how cultural studies and postmodernism can be and have been used to silence inquiry by doing what Stoll says is " reducing intellectual discourse to relations of power and dismissing opposed points of view as reactionary. Scholars have to be able to critique a text to consider the different imaginings of the "other" and to consider what's behind privileging one version of a history over another. Stoll argues that the consequence of publishing this rendering of Menchu's story with the guerrilla movement depicted as a movement for and with the peasants was a Novel peace prize that prolonged a war because it was tailored to the propaganda needs of a guerrilla movement that had lost hope and leverage; the war continued for another fourteen years even thought it did use the international human rights movement to keep pressure on the Guatemalan army and finally obtain the December 1996 peace agreement (which may have been resolved earlier had the book told a different story).

While I, Rigoberta Menchu presents a tale of the necessary guerrilla movement to resist government oppression, Stoll concludes his book by asking What gave rise to such ferocious regimes  in the first place? And Greg Grandin offers an answer to this in his book The Last Colonial Massacre.  Similar to Grandin's argument, Stoll explains that the US bears much of the responsibility for this progressively violent militarization of the Guatemalan government. And the guerrilla movement has to accept responsibility for positioning the peasants as military targets, specifically indigenous groups who do not share the revolutionary vision. The imagery of native insurrection spread through the rhetoric of I, Rigoberta Menchu (notice that I am careful not to say that it was Menchu, specifically) was critical to romanticizing the guerrilla movement and its legitmacy. Stoll has argued that the Menchu family was not representative of the poorest peasants and that the idea of a guerrilla insurgency actually originated  in the plans of nonindigenous revolutionaries (Ladinos and ex-government agents as depicted in Tree Girl, When Mountains Tremble,  and Granito).  The middle class  radicals seeking solidarity with the countryside is an "urban romance" that is "more likely to kill off the left than build it" (282). 

• Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004. Print.
• Menchú, Rigoberta, and Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso, 1984. Print.
• Menchú, Rigoberta, and Ann Wright. Crossing Borders. London: Verso, 1998. Print.
• Mikaelsen, Ben. Tree Girl: A Novel. New York: HarperTempest, 2004. Print.
•  Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. Print.

Signs of Change: Past and Present Cultural Landscapes of Guatemala, 2012

Signs of Change: Past and Present Cultural Landscapes of Guatemala, 2012

Posada de Don Rodrigo, Antigua

Casa Herrera, owned and operated by the University of Texas at Austin and Fundacion Pantaleon: curriculum development


Iximche --Lake Atitlan: pre-colonial archaeological site


Posada de Don Rodrigo, Panajachel
 
San Pedro, women's weaving collectives

Chichicastenango: market, center of K'iche Maya culture

Santo Tomas Church: Maya and Catholic rituals blended

Proyecto Linguistico Francisco Marroquin: Kachiquel language presentation

Patchali School: primary school

Tikal National Park
 
Jaguar Inn

"Radical [or Thick] Democracy" (Lensmire)

When I titled this blog "Thick Democracy," I had in mind a kind of democracy beyond the form of capitalism the United States is offering the world in then name of "progress" and "development" (that from which Mignolo argues a delinking). I am not interested in markets or globalization or domination or producing workers for the "free market" who live to work rather than work to live. I certainly do not mean the monocultural tradition of our nation. Nor do I see democracy as episodes of voting and majority rules. That democracy sit in the realm of what Mignolo calls the "rhetoric of modernity" veiled in the "logic of coloniality.' When I say democracy, thick democracy, what I mean is what Carr refers to in "Educating for Democracy": democracy is living inclusively, participatory, and with critical engagement that avoids jingoistic patriotism and a passive prescriptive ways of being. For Tim Lensmire, democracy means something similar. He sees it as Dewey did: "a way of life" that guides and expresses itself in our everyday habits and interactions with others. Because I am a teacher does not mean that my interest in education is restricted to the four walls of a classroom. No, as Dewey wrote in an essay about the rise of fascism in 1951, democracy should be in sites were we live:

When I think of the conditions under which men and women are living in many foreign countries today, fear of espionage, with danger hanging over the meeting of friends for friendly conversation in private gatherings, I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (392)

When we think about our schools, we hear news reports about teachers and data about test scores and financial incentives for teachers who can raise those test scores. We don't hear a lot about the companies creating those very tests or the testing market. Why aren't we talking about living? Why are we talking about living democracy? Because if we name our current state of schooling, it might be called how living free market or living capitalism. If we focus on life in the classroom, we can get closer to that inclusive, participatory, and critical engagement that we need, and I say we as a human beings, not as America or the United States. We are human beings, and our students need to live a life that resonates with all human beings not Western-centric ways of knowing, but human ways of knowing and being. 

Lensmire talks about the writing workshop as a "blueprint for democratic living," and while I will include note about that here, I ultimately want to think about the novel, specifically literature of atrocities (Langer),  is a blueprint for living. Essentially, I think that how we teach and what we teach has to be thick democratic practice, but I think teaching and living both require a willingness to enter crisis and work through crisis, to experience disequilibrium and find equilibrium. And the literature of atrocity seeks to create this framework just at the writing workshop does. In both frameworks, you can only come to some sense of knowing if you encounter and then work through crisis. Clenndinen talks about the Gorgon effect where when people are faced with something hideous, or a crisis, then turn away or reject it, but I am suggest, along with scholars of critical pedagogy, that we disrupt the status quo so that we can feel that critical engagement and participate in constructing not just knowledge but lived experience.

Lensmire applies Bakhin's description of carnival as a metaphor for democracy and thus living democracy in the classroom. He identifies several important features of the carnival. The first is "participation for all" where the line between spectator and performer is blurred. The second is "free and familiar contact among people" where there is a disorderly mixing of people but with a free and familiar attitude over everything.  Next is a playful , familiar relation to the world. Writing workshops, advocated by Donald Graves and Nancie Atwell,  apply these features do not lock students in the spectator role like traditional classrooms because the students are active producing authors  or engage writing companions not consuming readers (or consumers in capitalism).  There is a free and familiar movement where students are writing alone, conferencing, sharing lessening the social distance among themselves and the teacher. Of course, Lensmire cautions teachers from falling into the traditional hierarchical roles when it comes to facilitating the workshop or evaluating rather than clarifying intentions of student writing. Thus, we see that the writing workshop is lives democratic social relations and encourages an engagement with school tasks transforming writing into a playful, familiar relation to the world. They see the effect of what they have to say on multiple audiences. So we see here how the workshop disables the social order of capitalism or Western ideology of development and growth that needs to evaluate, consume and is product oriented.

One concern of the writing workshop is a similar concern with the rhetoric of modernity and that is of individualistic efforts and rewards. Indeed, individualism does, as Berlin (1988) writes a "denunciation of economic, political, and social pressures to conform" (486), it is lacking that social aspect of democracy. Students can target an authority figure like Lensmire describes (17), but they need to retain that ambivalent quality (getting at the crisis or discomfort I mentioned earlier) in order to get at the "critical" engagement I also cited earlier.  These are still "carnavalescque" as Lensmire argues because of one more aspect Bakhtin talks about and that is the profane nature of carnivals where there is abuse and people are laughed at, but for Bakhin, as Lensmire argues, " profanation is profoundly ambivalent -- that is, both negative and positive, both destructive and regenerating" (11). And so I think this is the potential of the writing workshop to be "thick." While the workshop can be situated in personal narratives, students can push their writing in a change that challenges aspects of their world like Dewey's street corner conversations about the uncensored news. Lensmire writes, "for Bakhtin, carnival abuse represented an explicit, collective struggle with an oppressive social order. At best writing workshops as currently imagined, might allow for individual dissent. At worst, they might shut down even this, because their guiding visions provide no real resource for making sense of and responding to student resistance and opposition" (20). I would argue that this is where we are in America, too. 

Not only is there an issue with the teacher's role, but we also have to be concerned with how students, human beings, treat one another. Lensmire says, "My worry is that this openness and fluidity is only apparent, that beneath it are more stable patterns of peer relations among children that divide them, subordinate some to others, and routinely deny certain children the help and support that others receive from peers" (21). Of course, if we can unmask and subvert these structures in our schools, imagine what will happen in the lived spaces outside the institution. In his book, Powerful Writing, Responsible Teaching, he tells stories of how such valuations and devaluations of peers were acted out in social/physical patterns and the stories in the workshop. Lensmire explains that the stories we write and live are acting out how the world and we are "supposed" to be and then what we might "imagine" ourselves and the world to be. The "supposed" might be the free market, consumer-oriented, the-strong-survive culture of America, and the "imagined" might be that which students cannot say or do or would like to say or do -- this might be in that hegemonic frame, but it might also be in a more liberatory frame. I had a student writes a short story about bullying, and she rendered the bully from her own experience and created a new character, the protagonist, to be an upstander. When I asked her to talk to me about her choices, the students said, "Because I couldn't do it. Because I know I should be an upstander, but I want somewhere to sit at lunch, and I can't afford to stand up." This was the canonical peer culture that Jerome Bruner (1990) talks about. So we see that the writing workshop has the potential to contribute to the more humane, inclusive, participatory democracy -- thick democracy -- where they learn relations with the world through peer relations. In these spaces of interaction, multiple world views, potentially conflicting world views, perform a sort of crisis that people can, in fact, embrace rather than reject -- that is, if we can learn to welcome and value this sort of critical engagement.

In a traditional school, and even in some schools labeled "progressive," students learn that their success actually depends on avoiding conflict and conforming to the rules and expectations of their teachers. The teacher has the power. I don't think there is anyway around this, for even when I "give up my power," I am using my power to do so. I don't actually want to give up my power or be a neutral voice. I want to use my power to disrupt oppressive structures,  and I think that scholars of critical pedagogy (Freire, Giroux, MacLaren) would say that teachers, in fact, should not be neutral. Lensmire uses the metaphor of a novelist and Bakhtin's concepts of monologic and polyphonic novels to make a point about the power of a teacher.

The novelist moves with power in relation to the character in both monologic and polyphonic novels.  The question, then, is not whether the novelist does or does not exert control, but to what end the novelist's power is put. In the monologic novel, the novelist's power is used to create a single worldview, praised and elaborated by the subordinate voices of subordinate characters. In the polyphonic novel, the novelist's power is used to create multiple, conflicting worlds embodied in the voices  of divers characters. The polyphonic novelist arranges situations and encounters with other characters that provide and clarify the characters' own perspectives...as Bakhtin put it: "The issue here is not an absence of, but a radical change in, the author's position" (p. 67). And that radical change is in the service of the destruction of a single, dominating, monologic worldview. (Lensmire 39)

The teacher's role then, if we can substitute teacher for author as Lensmire intends, is to help students make sense of their own worldview and their place in it while bringing into the conversation other worldviews being careful not to reproduce the monologic paradigm of traditional pedagogies by enforcing their own worldview. When I talk of disrupting oppressive structures, I am thinking about traditional schooling as a "plot in which a person's social position or category determines her relations with the institution and the people within it...where the humanness or uniqueness of an individual has no decisive influence on how the story turns out...by sorting and classifying" (42).

I am thinking about the twelve students assigned to me last year whom the district admittedly failed, students in our school since kindergarten but permanently sorted into Title One services only to arrive in eighth grade still "failing" the ACCESS test and reading a the "third grade" level according to NWEA testing. There was nothing categorical about these individuals, and only have "finishing" the prescribed, teacher-proof program, did we all discover the student's life outside the classroom was what Lensmire calls "an adventure." Our classroom became a workshop where the students, for the first time, were asked to take up a new relation with their teacher and peers -- to teach each other, write with each other, talk to each other, and even each with each other. The child's voice emerged out this opportunity to speak and write out their experiences -- both real and imagined. It was only because we asked each other to tell stories that their lives became as important as the literature we were reading. They saw that their experiences and their traumas -- and there were many traumas -- are worth telling. And it was only through sharing those stories and hearing people's questions that they found points of crisis to "explore and expose" in their writing. Some chose to expose this in fiction (like the student who created a character to be an upstander), but some left blank pages saying that they were not ready to explore that crisis yet. The blank page actually spoke volumes.  The key here is that, for many of these students, they had been obedience in filling out worksheets and repeating what teachers told them. They learned to write by writing what the teacher told them to write, and when they produced what they were told, they were encouraged -- even rewarded with candy.These students were coerced for so many years by institutional authority, and I didn't really stop the coercion, to be honest. As you can see, I did not resist interfering with the meaning students were trying to make. I told Julia that the poem about her baby brother's laughter was worth writing, and I told Juanita that a story about the smell in the visiting center where her father is in jail is worth exploring in a vignette.Yes, we talk about craft and figurative language, but we also talk about what it means. I actually go even further into their business, however, when I talk about what I know and think about the world and the people in it. I push -- yes, I push -- for the meanings and values in the poems and stories asking What is the message here? What do you want me to feel and discover? What value are you putting into the world? What ideas are living in these words that will go out and shape the world? This is why I always ask for a "letter to the reader" (me) about what choices were made and why. However, I don't think what we did last year was for the sake of reading and writing. Our dialogue was about writing to make sense of the ways we are in the world and noticing, even valuing, how our ways of being are different. Lisa Delpit would have teachers take that further to say that teachers should not only make visible the differences between individuals but to make visible the "rules of power" and how society values ways of being in the world.

I think Lensmire would name the work I described above as "deliberation." When students find these beautiful, powerful moments in their lives to explore and expose, they need to also consider how their rendering of those moments  is "bound up with the cultures they inhabit and that inhabit them." So much of schooling is about the individual, and so much about the writing workshop is about honoring the individual stories of students, but this has been at the expense of silencing the hierarchy of cultures and   "meanings and values of family, community, and peers, " in different cultures (51). While I am interested in teaching students how to express themselves through writing, I am also interested in that participatory aspect of democracy thinking about how reading and writing (and other literacies) can foster a participation and then a critical engagement with their world. For this reason, I think that it is not enough to have students express themselves or their world. They need  frameworks for understanding their own worldview and access to other worldviews to see the intersection of such frameworks. The self does not exist in a vacuum. It is formed by social relations.  Lensmire quotes Joseph Harris (1987): "Writing is not simply a tool we use to express a self we already have; it is a means by which we form a self to express" (161). Lensmire clarifies that the self is not necessarily determined by cultural resources, but "the resources available -- the experiences, languages, histories, and stories -- obviously constrain the possible selves you can become" (63). What critical pedagogy asks for, then, is that students become active participants in the construction of their worlds. Are my students beginning to see that they can, in fact, shape their path? Once they realized that their academic and  thus social path was controlled by this test that they didn't think twice about -- ACCESS -- they certainly felt that they at least held a hammer. And this was just the beginning of the unveiling of the framework.

When students come to me with a cute story or a poem, the critical pedagogue I fancy myself to be,  I have to question. I have to ask them why?I have to ask them for the meaning of this writing and what it contributes or silences. Yes, sometimes they just want to write about pandas, but I do ask "Why pandas? Why is this what you know and what interest you? How did you come to prefer this creature? What are you not writing about  because you chose pandas?"  I think, and Lensmire seems to agree, that we have to take up a critical position as to the meaning of students' writing, and we have to question their intentions. If we don't do this, students' work will not get beyond expression and individualistic in a world dependent on relations. Giroux writes:

Developing a pedagogy that takes the notion of student voice seriously means developing a critically affirmative language that works both with and on the experiences that students bring to the classroom. This means taking seriously and confirming the language forms, modes of reasoning, dispositions, and histories that give students an active voice in defining the world; it also means working on the experiences of such students in order for them to examine both their strengths and weaknesses. (1991, 104)

Great. Now we have all these participating voices, but Lensmire asks what if those voices "sound too much like the already existing world." He questions critical pedagogues as seeming "overconfident that student voice will flourish in the face of questioning." The "critical" point here is to provide access to worldviews that will help students answer the questions or, better yet, ask more questions  and explore and expose those questions in their writing.  Lensmire talks of "appropriation" as

the activity of the self in the face of cultural resources  [where] the individual responds to and transforms the utterances of others in the production of her own speaking and writing. Thus, on one hand, the idea of appropriation reminds us that our voices are dependent on the voices of others who preceded us and provides us with words to use...On the other hand, ...[it] highlights the taking over, the working over, by individuals, of the language of others. (77). 

And so with the carefully chosen texts that read multiple world views, students will have a consciousness about how their world views were constructed as through this "crisis" or realization create something new, something that is still theirs but is now deliberately collective. They are not merely repeating the old -- what teachers or text told them -- but  entering the conversation and "taking a position in relation to others and the meanings and values that precede us" while also "revising that position, that voice, across time" (84).

Essentially, the teacher has to engage and exert some power to position students in relation to others in their own culture and that of others so that their voices develop. Is this the "develop" of capitalism? No, we are not talking about creating a workforce. It is about students awakening , being conscious. This has not been met without resistance -- to say the least. The students I mentioned above complain about having to think all the time. They are fighting the voices of their parents and siblings and teachers  from whom they've learned; they are fighting the person they are "supposed" to be. (Julia wants to be a mom like her older sister who is 16 with two kids. And Juanita think she is like her sister destined to be in the alternative high school with the "loser".) Lensmire writes, "there is pain that often accompanies saying this , and not that. Students need others if their voices are to continue to develop. Within the classroom, they need teachers who recognize their struggles for voice, and help them transform these struggles into occasions for becoming" (84). Their lives have not been written, and as participants, with the practice being participants,  they can shape not only their future, but that of the collective. And as the teacher participant, I will help. They will interact with others outside and inside their primary associations -- even if the school is determined to control this through sorting-- they will encounter different ways of acting, thinking and feeling. Lensmire suggests that we 1) recognize what he calls "friendship groups" granting them the right to choose who they need for comfort, information and inspiration and 2) create "public spaces, sharing times, within which meaning and values issuing from these groups are questioned, shaken for integrity, deliberated, and reconstructed" (96).  Here we are doing what Lensmire say is "actively seeking to understand" what others are saying (and why and how). We have to shake students of the traditional value of silence and obedience in the classroom and cultivate inclusivity, participation and critical engagement.

The Literary Imagination (Langer)

1937, Guernica by Picasso on display at MOMO

The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975)
Lawrence L. Langer

"The very dilemma which has inspired so much critical controversy -- a univers concentrationnaire which refuses to be subjugated by the rules of traditional rhetoric, but which asserts the essential realities of its hell in spite of the dry husks of verbal formulae which contain or express them" (63).

Langer's contribution to literary criticism is his genre of "literature of atrocity"; he asks his readers to consider what it has achieved,  and he wants to call this body of literature to the attention of readers. He is interested in how a writer has devised an idiom and a style for the unspeakable. This book attempts to impose some critical order on a selected imaginative works around the themes of

•  the aesthetic problem of reconciling normalcy with horror;
• the displacement of the consciousness if life by the immanence and pervasiveness if death;
•  the violation of childhood; 
• the assault on physical reality; 
• the distinction of rational intelligence; and 
• the disruption of chronological time.

He begins with an examination of Art saying that it is not its "transfiguration of empirical reality but its disfiguration, the conscious and deliberate alienation of the reader's sensibilities from the world of the usual and familiar, with an accompanying infiltration into the work if the grotesque, the senseless, and the unimaginable,to  such a degree that the possibility of aesthetic pleasure ...is intrinsically eliminated" (3).  The uncertain nature of the experience recorded, combined with the reader's feeling of puzzled involvement in it, prohibits Adorno's well cited fear that there should be no poetry after Auschwitz in that the reader may discern in the inconceivable fate of the victims. The principle of aesthetic stylization such as the sequence and structure is one way that art forces us to search for more adequate basis for apprehending the human suffering because it leaves us with mystery and silence. Art performs the paradox of incomprehension despite the logic of language and structure. If we consider the forces of historical fact and imaginative truth, Langer offers that we will see that literature is never wholly invented and never wholly factual --the task of the artist, then, is making such reality possible for the imagination.

Langer quotes Gilman: "If anything, literature, like all art, is the account of what history has failed to produce on its own, so that men had to step in to make good the deficiency" (9). The deficiency is, I think, what Langer calls the "unity of impression." Cleary, the Holocaust experience cannot evoke it; "art of atrocity is unsettling art indifferent to the peace that passeth understanding and intent only on reclaiming for the present, not the experience of the horror itself...but a framework for responding to it, for making if imaginatively (if not literally) accessible... wrestling from silence the language that had survived its fearful events but lacked the eloquence and precision of vocabulary to describe it" (13). The language that was wrestling from the silence, however, comes with a distrust for sufficiency of language.Langer quotes Steiner who actually thinks that the art of literature can do something that testimony cannot. Steiner suggests that perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus in them rationally and imaginatively; to those who experienced the thing, it has lost the hard edges if possibility, it has stepped outside the real (20). However, Langer reminds us that some survivors became writers because they arrived at a different conclusion (Levi).

Normalcy and Horror: Langer then moves to examining the difference between violence and atrocity. What event occurs for "no apparent reason"? An explicable event :in the sense that a cause and effect exist the connection between agent and victims is clear and suffering seems to be a direct consequence of the impetus behind it. Atrocity, on the other hand, has its consequences in excess of the situations that  inspired them; but because its literary expression is rooted in a historical reality  that haunts the reader we cannot dismiss it as we might some other literature from Dickens or Poe. This conclusion goes against that of Clendinnen who can easily dismiss fiction and does not feel obligated to attend to it as she does testimony or "purely" historical texts. Therefore, Langer says that the task of artist is to find a form and style to present the atmosphere or landscape of atrocity to make it compelling, to coax the reader into credulity- and ultimately, complicity. The task of the critic, then, is not to ask whether it should be done since it had been but to ask how it had been done, to judge its effectiveness and analyze its implications for literature and society (22).

Pervasiveness of Death: Literature of atrocity "reverses the customary growth toward insight that fiction has trained the imagination to expect by transforming death into a vital image and reducing life to an aborted journey" (65). The narrator of the fiction is forced by the discovery of death what it means to die and "the state of insane desolation to which we are reduced when life is done." The melancholy conclusion of the literature of atrocity offers death as a collective tragedy altering the meaning of life. Langer examines Pierre Gascar's The Season of the Dead  to explore the narrator confrontation between the pre-Holocaust reality and the l'univers concentrationnarire. Gascar uses language to "lure the imagination" but we see the experience of the narrator alientates him from himself and his values, so Langer asks "what effect must it have on his audience?" Langer writes, ""Gascar chooses his metaphors and similes as weapons to assault the sensibilities and break down any remaining reluctance on the part of the reader to accept the 'abnormal' world of his fiction as an accurate reflection of modern reality" (68).

• Can art indeed conjure a reality that itself must remain forever unredeemable? It has made an attempt groping toward a possibility that tests its resourcefulness and perhaps defines its limitations.
• Aesthetic distance or indifference: indifference is a failure of the artists imagination ti seduce the spectator into a feeling of complicity with the material of his drama
• Complicity what does Langer mean!
• Using historical evidence: piling atrocity on atrocity without imaginative orientation for the development of the  human faculty to be disoriented ; the artist can make the testimony accessible  yet leave the inhabitants of the literary edifice incredulous and dismayed --- talking about the failure of The Investigation
• Literature of innuendo : author were conspiring with his readers to recapture an atmosphere of insane misery which they somehow shared, without wishing to name or describe it in detail
• Imagery of insulation: insulation separating two worlds and the effect of one upon the other and the reverse... The colors, the time, the temperature , the textures, the clarity or veiling... Shades and tones of sketching visions of the unspeakable  43
• Verisimilitude is insufficient: some quality of the fantastic stylistic or descriptive become essential; precise details may overlook the existence in a middle realm between life and death with its ambiguous and inconsistent appeals ti survival and extinction which continuously undermined the logic if experience without offering any satisfactory alternative--- distortions wrought by their veils if fantasy only illuminate the terrors of the reality with an unholier flow 43
• Dreams as an answer to problems of characterization  and style which novelists exploiting this material will have to confront-- the creation of  characters with divided and often uncomplimentary sensibilities, passive, or with exaggerated impulses like capacity for cruelty-- dream exposé something about the mental states and motives--but the have to be surrealistic and fragmentary where rational details are brought into fantastic juxtapositions and made more rather than less coherent   --- it is unlike other fiction compelled to employ the implications of fact to create its unique aesthetic appeal46
• Irrrealism: impact of holocaust on dreams of survivors and then use dreams or surreal to capture the disorientation
• Death in this genre is not concerned with whether one must die it that one must die- the question of other fictions and the growth focused readers-- but how it would happen, so the artist is faced within fusing literature with a sense of dying unimaginable in pre- holocaust

• The reader will experience what Clendinnen calls the Gorgon effect. The discomfort engendered by the uncertainties that will account for the psychological and emotional rejection provoked by the content of the literature of atrocity, and I would argue that the content of literature is quite different than that of ' history."  The reader, if he persists and does not reject as in the Gorgon effect, becomes a temporary inhabitant of uc recreating in collaboration with the artist the features of reality that history had declared extinct but which continue to haunt the memory and imagination with echoes of unquenchable despair 73.   I don't think you can go this far as to say the reader inhabits

• Eric Kahler--"true art create a new reality as a new sphere of conscious life; true art has an exploratory quality; true art  lifts into the  light of our consciousness a state of affairs,a layer of existence, that was dormant in the depth of our unconscious that was buried under obsolete forms, conventions, habits of thought and experience."

• Anne Frank does not pretend to concern itself with the uniqueness of the reality transforming  life outside the attic walls that insulated her vision confirming the sentimentality of an audience that pursues Anne's reality that us unable or unwilling to peer beyond the end of her tale to the new reality symbolized by her wretched death 77
• Night challenges her (Anne's) epitaph about believing people are good; the difficult struggle between language and truth that every author must engage in and the important distinctions it draws between the holocaust itself and it's tale; what really happened and what we tell about what happened... The power of the imagination to evoke an atmosphere does far more than the historian's fidelity to fact to involve the uninitiated reader in the atmosphere of the holocaust 79; Wiesel the writer has transcended history and autobiography and used the imagery if atrocity and his own experience to involve the non participant in the essence of its world
• With historical info - numbers, places, names- cease to affect the mind or imagination not because they lack significance but  because the mind and imagination lack a suitable context for the information; thus Wiesel focuses on the implications and selects scenes and feelings creating an indispensable vestibule for anyone wishing to venture farther into it 83

• Schizophrenic art the art of atrocity 88

• Fiction: scenic organization, characterization through dialogue, periodic. Lunacies, elimination of superfluous or repetitive episodes, ability to arouse empathy of his readers, which elusive to writers bound by fidelity to fact...and I would argue that fact is just as elusive and does not access the  imagination that I'd capable of empathy; to evoke rather than describe the  two world- pre and during holocaust

• Inadequacy of this supposed  common consciousness: authors had to fight a reader reluctance based nit on an inability to understand but on the alleged assumption of the reader that he understood it too well, that there is little need to burden the human imagination with further morbid explorations of horrible reality which anyone with s long memory is ready aquainted 91

• Problem of tension: actuality events that literally occurred and reality the attempts of the mind to absorb such events into literary harmony or to compose a new dissonance that make endurable and meaningful to the imaginative ear 92
• The theoretical dilemma of the suffering of children: have characters bear literary witness to a portion of reality which eluded classification among conceivable and endurable human experience;iterate technique is contrived descriptive realism designed to offend the reader's sense of justice 131

• Dostoevsky and Camus dramatize child suffering from the point of view of adult visions; neither had attempted to recreate the universe of their suffering from the pov of the children's confused and tormented eyes; the resulting concentration and intensity of outlook ANd action would have imposed limitations too restrictive to the artistic designs if their works 133--the child not capable of mature insight but this world would result in the new imaginative world which Camus anticipated when he called in the artists of his time  to create dangerously:' an equilibrium between reality and man's rejection of that reality... Different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular yet universal, full of innocent insecurity' 134

• Fiction will leave confusions in a void of uncertainty-- the same void characters inhabit and in turn reproduces the atmosphere if baffled apprehension  139; the behavior of children as children is consistently framed by fear as their inner desire to retain the securities of their youth impinges on the oppression that disrupts the normalcy of their lives; let's pretend only intensifies fright

• The moment one speaks of the reality of the holocaust, one is compelled to include its unreality find the two coexist as a fundamental principle of creation; the style of the modern novel does not seek to inform  as dues the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant if what it had to say; it is invention, invention of the world and if man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation Alain Robert-grilley- for a new novel, essays on fiction 1965

• Bewitching paradox if the art of atrocity: like music it depends on sound  not stillness for its aesthetic effect  , starts with a harmony. Includes familiar associations  then adds dissonance( as should teaching) that abruptly undercuts the continuity and produces an intellectual  shock ... Lacking verbal equivalent that resounds fr the silence through its absence; two worlds collide in unspoken dialogue

• Endings-- lit if atrocity dies not have to be specific not could it be since the very nature of the reality it seeks to apprehend repudiates the mind's attempt to organize its insights into s comprehensive pattern or to suggest an interpretation of the events if the fiction consistent with the expectations of reason or tradition 163

• Ending and reader: speechless with a giant silence of the brain and a paralysis of the emotions rather than empathy is with the literature of atrocity substitutes for Aristotle's idea of predation not the green leaf of having shared the tragic destiny of the heroic a fallible human character but I kind of stupefied uncertainty as to whether or not the events we have encountered have actually occurred and so as fantasy or reflection of authentic experience 164

• Suffering of victims:  the specific forces behind he suffering of the victims are as anonymous as they themselves are destined to become and the choice of children as victims compounds the anonymity and intensifies the atmosphere of intimidation

• Metaphor and Extreme youth -- an opportunity to trace the evolution of a still unformed human creature's response to atrocity with immediacy because of the imaginative universe using metaphor as a device for evoking the atmosphere of terror; rather than diminishing. The evil and horror if the real atrocities they make them feel less strange less unique and less alien... So more terrible and  more tolerable

• The author may have nothing to do with the literary experience but reflects the philosophy of the reader who sees himself as a potential victim and flees from the consequence if this possibility -- clendinnen's gorgon effect 175

• the question of deciphering motive-- fiction can help us humanity's dilemma in trying to account for the unaccountable and the lengths we will go rather than accept the possibility of the pure will to torture and destruction as a valid expression of human instinct under certain historical and psychological circumstances 179

• Discard implied action through dialogue and draw the reader into the physical substance of reality; words are illusory veils that disintegrate upon touch penetrating the intellectual facade of the reader as spectator and reaches the organs and nerve ends of his being  dissipating aesthetic distance and creating a reader engage a direct emotional participant in the experience if atrocity 182

• parody of Bildungsroman: parody this that educates a youthful protagonist in the ways of society so that he may enter into some kind of productive or creative alliance with it.... A bleak, hostile, Solitary future 189

• Temporality: The tragedy of a crime always remains with the living 190

Chronological : exploring precedents in time

Antichronological-- inner world- a sundering of each generation from the other; the unique quality of the evil rife during this period entrenched it in the private mind disqualifying it from the possibility of shared experience of communal suffering; time not as an indefinite continuous concept but as separate units which; must not be related and become history 273( missing link that joins cause to effect and reason to result ; external rituals that displaced the active inner moral life 282

Nonchronological - one event while the narrator reaches backward on time and forward establishing s fictional pattern that deliberately violates normal sequence without substituting any definable, alternative temporal scheme yo guide the floundering reader  285; Reader must learn to recognize the unannounced time shifts by the allusions that mark it a technique to suggest the voyage to Buchenwald and the camp experience have severed past from future-- the reality of a nightmare; once inside this experience one never entirely regains the feeling of being outside

Issues of Representation (Clendinnen)

Reading the Holocaust (1999)
Inga Clendinnen

 "The doing of history, our ongoing conversation with the dead, rests in the critical evaluation of all the voices coming from the past, in our reconstruction of the circumstances of their speaking, and on our critical evaluation of our own 'natural' unexamined responses to those voices" (21).

Richard Rorty says that we need to be educated in the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers and that with such imaginative ability we'd be readier to count the cost of our own gratifications and to  temper our quests for autonomy and abundance (163).  Clendinnen examines issues of representation in her book Reading the Holocaust where she examines the texts of various actors in the Holocaust including survivors, those in the Resistance, and, controversially, the "perpetrators" from Himmler to SS officers to Sodderkomandos. Of interests to my work is her examination of representation, specifically her concerns with fiction.

The novel has the task of reaching the moral imagination, and according to Rorty, the novel can be the prime educator of the popular imagination. Is the novel, however, seeking to extend our knowledge or assume it? Clandennen suggests there are innate difficulties in the successful literary representation of the process of genocide, specifically the Holocaust.  Such problems are with representation: any representation may appear a falsification or sentinentalisation of the general condition. In these fictions, ones that she cites as perhaps more effective than others,  it is "the reader struggling for a foothold, finding none, who is the protagonist feeling the moral vertigo investing that cursed place" (169). But  does this author of fiction have to have been there in order to write effective fiction, to reach the moral imagination? That the authors are "selecting, shaping , and inventing" out of direct participation and observation more valid than author who is inventing without having been a firsthand witness? Why is it insufficient for the author to have been a listener as Felman in Testimony might argue? And, if the author is a first hand witness, can the author create fiction and thus separate from the genre of "survival testimony"? Is fiction, in fact, a place where subjective experience can be represented with high art by a witness-artist? And if so, what happens to the testimony of witnesses who are not artists? Can't the artist be the listener in that case?

Clendinnen talks about the "been there" quality that supplies an under text of intimate moral implication never present in pure fiction. When comparing History and Fiction, she says that each establishes quite different relationships between writer and subject and writer and reader. Fiction, for example, provide access to inner thoughts and secret actions of closed others  that can teach about life; however, the fiction world contains a "curious absence" in that the only responsibility of the reader is to respond to what the text says. Clendinnen, as the reader, feelsno human responsibility towards these people saying because the characters are fiction that the compassion is fiction; you know the people are fiction. In nonfiction, however, there is no creator to strip away the characters'  veils, so the protagonist will be opaque to the reader who will engage with them differently because of the moral relationship --as a fellow human being whose blood is real and death is final (170).  Thus, Clendinnen argues, the reader assumes a different contract with the writer depending on whether the writer is "offering me fiction or claiming to report on this mundane world." Indeed, the rich accounts of physical circumstance and interior states that fiction provides are the freedoms and riches  of  the privilege of fiction not to be simulated in historical writings as it would violate the historian's unstated but binding contract both with their reader -- to stay in close contact with evidence -- and with their characters, the once real people they have chosen to represent (171).

So, Clendinnen is concerned with the costs of fiction's freedoms  claiming she has not forgiven Nabokov "for installing those images in my mind, because they are gratuitous, things of his own invention"  and that she stapled together the pages of Bend Sinister dealing with the death of David Krug (172). She is not compelled to heed the text as it is "only" fiction and that she is under no "obligation to attend" saying she could close the book (as she could do of nonfiction, too). Her point is that "we" listen differently to stories we know are "real" versus stories that are invented. While she says that we marvel at the imagination of a fiction writer and are brought to wonder at ourselves when faced with "real thought and actions," I find that she is truly dismissive of the artist endeavor of a writer who truly does intend to render real thought and action and truly does expect the reader to attend. Real thought and action coming from a survivor or a a perpetrator is a rendering of a lived experience; what of an artist who listens and then renders -- only with the skill to reach the moral imagination and create that moral vertigo in that reader?

Clendinnen does say that writing is our best bet at understanding history, but also says that the historian is best suited for this task of "speaking for the dead: because they "take this libery under the rule of the discipline, and the rule is strict"; she goes on to say that "historians must retrieve  and represent the actualities of past experience in accordance with our rule, with patience, skepticism and curiosity, and with whatever art we can muster -- provided always that the art remains subject to our rule" (182). (However, she ends her book with a poem saying the poem says "much of what I have been trying to say over these pages in as many words. ") Nevertheless, we can agree on this point: "writers must destroy silence in order to represent it" (177).  The writer -- and I think it has to be an artist - has the task of mediating an experience --in fact, all access to experience must be mediated -- but Clendinnen believes that the very words are solid representations of that which is quite obscure because memory can be unstable; nevertheless, the written word brings an "awareness of a truth that the daily work of living,  like the daily work of doing history,  tempts us to forget."

In the shadow of the Holocaust none of us is at home in the world because now we know the fragility if our content. If we are to see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it, we cannot afford to be blinded  by reverence or abashed into silence or deflected into a search for reassuring myths. We must do more than register guilt, or grief, or anger, or disgust, because neither reverence for those who suffer nor revulsion from those who inflict this suffering will help us overcome its power to paralyze, or to see if clearly. (182)

Milan Kundera : The struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting (183).

• We need to know both ourselves and the worlds we are capable of making if we can hope to change any pat if either. 16
• The  gorgon effect -- do not look away at the reality that it is within our human content that such atrocities happen; we are the agents -- look
• The problem of transcendence 20
• Wiesel says only survivors may speak because no one who has not experienced this event will ever be able up understand it
• Historians have to think  hard about how the documents before them relate to the actuality they are trying to retrieve and understand
• The eloquent episode: the apparently trivial moment which illuminates a world 43
• Survivor of camp- Levi; Resistance - Charlotte delbo;Sonderkommando- the prominents--mullet; Fried lander -- look at all of history's actors to understand
• To get all povs we need multiple stories why not a novel? The artist will bear witness to the testimony and render the truth
• Why should we look?  How dare we look at such degradation? What are we meant to learn from this viewing if a fellow human in extremist? 54 Such things are done because men and women willed them and were able to implement their will; we would be fools not to try to understand as precisely as we are able how that situation came about 54
• Moral imperative to be attentive
• Wood:  the unusual but not impossible demand the dead make upon the living
• Problem of asking identification: Do no ask for it. Our understanding will be as imperfect as our grasp  of all subjectivities-- we do not need identification but a long route of meandering observation, inference. And experiment 89 not attempting to identify with hitler if we are trying to understand the structure of ideology
• To understand us not to justify or excuse
• Analysts gave to attune their ears to what is in effect a new language masquerading as a familiar one: a language where a term like anti- semitism dies not mean spite or malice but the active conviction that every Jewish adult, child and infant is a dangerous enemy 93
• Banality of evil: incapable of self scrutiny, blandness of the surface presented for our inspection on the first person narrative; we need help making it accessible to our understanding in wars their -- hoess himmler- could not 107
• Cognitive imbalance-to create balance either your attitude to one or the other has to change
• Grossman - the history if warfare is the history if conditioning men to overcome their innate resistance to killing their fellow human beings
• Social plasticity if emotions alerts us to the possibilities too easily masked from us by our casual assumptions as to what constitutes the normal 126
• Habituation
• To not invoke evil or extra- human capitalisation accepts killers as human as Brownings work argues...explaining is not excusing and understanding is not forgiving... Could I have been moved to do the same? Asking this question forces us into the serious , imaginative reconstruction of a particular circumstance, temperament and personal history, and of the uncertainties haunting the whole enterprise of retrieval, which together constitute historical understanding 132
• Participatory rituals: texts in performance or acted texts are invaluable because they are public and viewable the heart made creation of whatever group it is we are trying to understand 141... Theatrical  reanimating the sense of purpose and invincibility authenticating the realism of an absurd ideology  
• Fiction offer access to the mute and silences beyond actions; we retreat to pathological psychology ... If such creatures live among us -- creatures acting beyond the theatrical  expectations-- we  must be careful to deny them the conditions and opportunities for their self realization 155

Decoloniality notes from Mignolo

What is the global response to western expansion or globalization? What are the consequences for the populations targeted for conversion to Christianity, for development, and now for human rights and democracy? Maya in Guatemala, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan. These are notes from Mignolo's The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options where he carefully puts forth his argument for the rhetoric of modernity as the darker side of coloniality -- a rhetoric that follows the logic of coloniality which began in the 1500s and continues to today. He presents several options that will shape global futures -- none of which are THE option -- while specifically elaborating the option of decolonial thinking and doing.

The notes here are really a collection of key concepts that Mignolo uses to make his argument, but I should say that during and after reading (and it was quite a lot to unpack) this book, I watched a documentary Breaking the Maya Code (2010), which reveals elements of Mignolo's argument as it presents Western efforts to understand Maya "glifs." While there is a lot to say about the connections between these pieces, as well as a great deal that I am reading on the topic of genocide and literature of atrocities, one important note is how the rhetoric of modernity actually interfered with "breaking the Maya code"; in other words, it was because efforts came from the "zero point" Mignolo talks about and the belief in the classification of humanitas and apropros, and because of racism, that the complexity of the Maya "language" was underestimated, and that researchers missed the history (the narrative of life, story-telling -- stories that had scribes or authors Ahtz'ib rendering the stories of their people ). Furthermore, it seems that scholarly disciplines - and first world approaches to such disciplines -- also prevented consideration of knowledge that came from a second world scholar ("behind the iron curtain").What might be an interesting extension of the argument of the logic of colonialism from 1500 to present, might be to look at classic Maya civilization in AD 822 whereby the cities from the 3rd to 9th centuries also underwent an expansion, which ended the  two or three superpowers wanting to expand their rule.Tikal and  Calican degenerated into warfare of the Southern lowlands -- the political and environmental exhaustion.

The people survived but the system did not. The scribal tradition was so strong that even the violence of the Spanish conquest could not destroy it. After the burning of the Maya books, the hieroglyphics were banded but 16th century scribes had learned from the Spanish friars to write in the Latin script. They transcribed histories, geneologies and myths using the Latin alphabet. Ceclio Can Canul was a scribe who survived using Latin script and the Maya language -- they never attended school or learned to write in a formal setting but these scribes learned to write one from the other. The Maya have preserved texts, guided explorers, shared knowledge of their beliefs and customs. Finally, the decipherment has come back to Guatemala. In the 1980s the villages were under siege, and through this, Maya people began attending conferences to preserve their languages and traditions with their culture under attack, and so history became especially precious. Nikte Sis Iboy, director of OKMA Language center, Antgua -- they learn the history of the Maya glifs and the classic language in workshops there and in other places in the region. They saw that the ideas that persist today existed in ancient times finding strength in the identity as Maya.  Knowing the history of your country that had been kept from them by Western scholars brought a voice to the silences, the 400 years of the suppression of the language and writing of Maya; the children were given Christian names and Spanish language. The history places people in time; the process of deciphering the language was a small step to understanding world view and history. What did the script contribute to the humanity; and it is something that each generation creates for itself and is thus never ending. The words of the ancient Maya scribes have begun to speak.

The task is the unveiling of Rhetoric of modernity, showing its darker side, advocating and building global futures that aspire to the fullness of life Esther than encouraging individual success at the expense of the many and of the planet (122)... Thick democracy

Salvation:saving souls conversion to christianity, managing bodies outside europe in emerging nation states through bio politics, make citizens consumers of biotechnology and pharmacology...turning health into market; the corp stage on controlling bodies; civilization mutated into economic development

Decolonization education: 80 percent no access to tech; will they become aware that they are the majority of the population and build a world in which tech is at the service of humanity rather than humanity in service of tech? Otherwise the matrix with reproduce. Get us out of the mirage of modernity and the trap of colonialist

Teach a poly centric world order; many lines of history coexist

5 trajectories and options that will shape global futures:

Rewesternization: save capitalism, us leadership maintenance, promote science and tech geared toward corp, knowledge for development, create consumer subjects living to work to consume
Reorientation of the left: a Marxist background,

Dewesternization classification (45) a pillar of western knowledge and epistemology ; calls into question the foundation of western knowledge, how to modernize without reproducing coloniality so that not only middle. Class enjoys standards of living but the entire planet; not sameness by inclusion but equal, separate, discrete and equivalent in power and authority without forgetting the colonial wound inflicted by racial difference; humanity in difference is to delink to think

Decoloniality: working and consuming to live, non exploitative world; decolonization means struggles to detach from capitalism and communism describing a period of struggles of non aligned states to expel imperial admin for independence ; Decoloniality is epistemological focusing on decolonizing knowledge rather than territory; it is the analytical task of unveiling the logic of coloniality and the prospective task of contributing to a world in which many worlds will coexist

The spiritual option : religions invented, spirituality can be found beyond religions, ways of life beyond capitalism and developments that keep consumers in dreamworlds; what are the options that westernize has held hostage? Spirituality is connected to land which is not a commodity nor private property nor as a provider of natural resources but modern society does not allow lifestyles not capitalist to prosper

Decolonizing: taking democracy seriously instead of using it to advance imperial designs or personal interests

capitalism: economic transaction , exploitation of labor, control and management of knowledge and subjectivities

Objectivity with out parentheses, Manturana: Management and obedience closed political system ready for totalitarian regimes and economy if production and wealth over human life

Objectivity with parentheses: open for inter epistemic dialogues cooperation in building a nonimperial world; we can in no way claim to be in possession if truth but there are numerous possibilities; with parentheses, truths are options

Zero point: to manage is to be in control of knowledge; establishes criteria for classification and who classifies, who removes the parentheses, global linear thinking (85))Believing society is divided between humanitas and anthropos

Exteriority: people who inhabit the outside in the process of defining the inside created from the perspective of the zero point of observation

Decolonial narratives incorporate nodes that have been silenced by imperial narratives do we can see the past and present as heterogeneous historic structural nodes (84)

Anthropos Assimilation : admit defeat repress what you are and embrace something that you were not

The task: anthropos to claim and assert through argumentation his or her epistemic rights to engage in barbarian theorizing in order to decolonize humanitas and in knowledge building to show that the distinction between anthropos and humanitas is a fiction controlled by humanitas (90)...not to resist but to re-exist in building Decolonial futures... The beginning if decolonizing authority and economy ; the right of western civ to exist among others but not to posit itself as the savior of the other

The house of modernity/coloniality: we have been born and raised and been classified from the perspective if the zero point among humanitas or anthropos... The built- in constructions of modern epistemology; it is our ethic responsibility up know and understand this house

M argues the illogic rationality of the hubris of the zero point and if the humanitas placing itself in the position of domination through the partition of the earth and classification of its people

Immigrant consciousness , 109: assumed condition if existence, for being in a place whose history is not the history of their ancestors; for indigenous who built their history in the land they inhabited then found themselves out of place when their form of life was displaced, destroyed , and replaced with ways of life and the institutions of migrants from Europe-- the awareness of coloniality of being

Sociogenic principle, Fanon :To speak means to use a certain syntax, to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization (maya indigenous lang); a man who has a language possesses the work expressed and implied in that language; mastery of language affords remarkable power (110)

Decolonial scientia: the scientia needed not for progress or development but fit liberating the actual and future victims of knowledge upon which progress and development are predicated; a culturally programmed sense of self; the experience of knowing that i am being perceived, in the eyes if the imperial other, as not quite human; it requires an act of humility to realize that there is no longer room for abstract universals and truths without parenthesis; and it takes a moment of rage and of losing fear to move from the colonial wound to decolonial scientia (114)1. Zero point denies the contributions of places, races, and sexes.2. Explore the consequences that western expansion had for the environment like natural resources needed by imperial economy exploring global responses the past 500 years; it's an imperial trap to just look locally.3. Generate knowledge to build communities in which life has priority over economic gains/ growth/development

Geopolitical being: how imperially made regions shape and conform people living in that region; the place that the region and it's inhabitants occupy in a global order of coloniality

Moving from the enunciated to the enunciation: who and when knowledge is generated, why and where knowledge is generated; anthropos who are now engaging in epistemic disobedience and delinking in order to be independent shall not behave like humanitas through Dewesternization or Decoloniality-- rejection of being told from the epistemic privileges of the zero point what we are, what our ranking is in relation to the ideal of humanitas, and what we have to do to be recognized (121); engage in epistemic disobedience to take on civil disobedience, but in modern western epistemology it can only lead to reform not transformations, so it starts from epistemic delinking

Body politics 140: the Decolonial response to state managed bio politics; it describes technologies ratified by bodies who realized they were considered less human and the very act of describing them as human was a radical un human consideration -- Sociogenic-- racism was the result of two conventions of imperial knowledge that certain bodies were inferior to others and inferior bodies carried inferior intelligence and languages-- if you argue that there are bodies in need of guidance from developed bodies saying you Want to work with local what agenda will be implemented yours or theirs? 143
Put human lives first rather than transformation if the disciplines...

Benveniste, the formal apparatus of enunciation: pronominal system , I/we if the enunciator with spatial and thirdly markers in reference to him/ her; frame of conversation or context familiar to participants; formation of disciplines; cosmological frames of theology and philosophy science in European schools and imperial languages

Discipline : Decolonial puts disciplinary tools at the service if the problem; anthropology puts the problem at the service of the discipline -- am I studying for my discipline or for the problem ???
Institutions: train new epistemically obedient members, control who enters and what knowledge making is allowed, disavowed, devalued, or celebrated

Time; 152,whatever the conceptualizarion of time in the social sciences today if us caught and woven into the imaginary ic the modern/ colonial world system... The way a culture has of perceiving and conceiving the world...colonial matrix of power located barbarians in space and then primitives in terms if time; Deloria159: the very essence of western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of western Europe became guardians of the world

But what is the difference between cultural relativism and colonial and Imperial differences and why is time so important, 160-- the distinction between modernity and tradition is made through the concept of time by which cultural differences were classified according to their proximity to modernity if to tradition, and now there is the sense of falling behind. The time and the west; all time concepts- progress,development; they need a defining point of arrival and by creating it's own tradition to show progress, the concept of tradition now seems universal. Doesn't every place have a tradition? Oh but you are beyond the times. See how far we've come. So now we have history, a linear time line ; recording the past in a linear fashion is one way; coloniality is much more than colonialism it is the matrix through which world order has been created an managed

Conflict : negotiate in non imperial ways; there is no trajectory or option that has the right to prevail over the other...pluriversality means unlearning modernity and learning to live with people one does not agree with of even like 176,

Chrono politics is a civilization principle that servicer ostracize all who do not conform to the
modern conventions of time; what it is a mean weapon to promote competition encouraging fast speed success consuming energy of millions of people who live their lives thinking of going faster and getting had being a winner avoiding the shame of being a loser

From Kant to a decolonial viewpoint: (189) The first are objectivity without parenthesis and an institutional viewpoint enunciated; the second set are objectivity in parenthesis and in enunciation.
1. What can I know?         Who is the knowing subject, and what is his/her material apparatus of enunciation?
2. What out I to do?           What kind of knowledge/understanding is he/she engaged in generating and why?
3. What may I hope?          Who is benefiting or taking advantage of such-and-such knowledge or understanding?
4. What is the human being?   What institutions (universities, media, foundations, corporations) are supporting and encouraging  such-and-such knowledge and understanding

Kant would say that answers would come from the disciplines of study -- metaphysics and anthropology -- but Mignolo would say answers cannot come from the very disciplines that are part of the problem. And the process of answering these questions comes from Western methods of gathering information, reasoning and interpreting.  So to change the terms of the conversation, the questions and answers have to be epistemically disobedient to the hegemonic ways of knowing and doing.

Double concsiousness and sociogenesis: at once reveal the forced coloniality behind the rhetoric of modernity and instead of assuming universal  human nature as a starting point, they decolonial thinkers start  with humankind divided between humanitas and anthropos; by changing the questions, we change the terms of the conversation, so instead of engaging Kant in his own rules to question the content, Mignolo wants to change the rules, to delink from Western presuppositions. Disengage in from categories of thought and assumptions; acknowledging modern categories are dominant in many if not all of us; delinking means to think from the silences and absences produced by imperial modern epistemology and epistemic practices

change the terms of the conversation:
imparative method: Pannikar -- the effort at learning from the other and the attitude of allowing our own convictions to be fecundated by insight of the other; focuses on dialogue, praxis, and existential encounters -- that is , reasoning from the senses and from the locations of the bodies in the colonial matrix of power
comparative method -- privileges dialectics and argumentative reasoning

chapter 7 -- Cosmopolitan Localisms
Cosmopolitanism is the ideology that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality but Mignolo wanted to  consider this in light of globalization -- linking them in ideology at first, but globalization came to mean political economy when markets were deregulated and profit was equated with growth. What was development and growth of a civilization became economic and so in the 1980s (Reagan and Thatcher), it came to mean imperial designs and a remaking of global coloniality and the concern for the expansion of the poverty line and the divide between the haves and have nots (and perhaps humanitas and the anthropos?).

How is cosmopolitanism possible in light of globalization?   Mignolo seems to see this as a "civilizing mission" as opposed to the freemarket mission of globalization; nevertheless, both are projects of Western expansionism. He traces this to the 18th century Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to show how because this project was tied to civil security and thus citizenship that it was under the rule of government -- so the temporal aspect was connected with the acceptance of the Declaration and the spatial aspect was where this rule was, which was Europe.Therefore, M concludes this was a civilizing mission and cosmopolitanism appeared to be an underlying project of Western expansion.  (259, the Kantian vision of cosmopolitanism)

mid-1500s -- theologians considered to what extend the Indians of the New World were human and to what extent, as a consequence, they had property rights. The coloniality of this question is clear for the Indians did not have concept of property nor right and land was a source of life and not a commodity.

Cosmopolitanism in a decolonial vein shall aim at the communal and not as a universal model but as a universal connector among different noncapitalist socio-economic organizations around the world (275) -- a model of organization and not society; many models will arise out of histories, memories, practices, languages, religions, categories of thought. First, delink from capitalism/communism/socialism.

International law (276) -- the historical and colonial foundation of international law was a the same time the foundation of rights and racism; natural law -- all human beings are born equal (ius genium) and endowed with the rights of people or nations; De Vittoria argued for the rights of Indians not to be invaded or dispossessed  (specifically by the Spaniards); However, when he moved to the classification of "los barbaros" and "principles Christianos," and in doing so his argument becomes more about cultural systems/practices and an assessment of an ideal of natural law placing human beings into this system where there is a hierarchy.  Thus, this classification and this system was not created by the Indians but De Vittoria -- onotlogically equal but epistemically unequal and thus not sovereign.  Thus, we see that colonial differences are built on the presupposition that epistemic deficiencies indicate ontological inferiority (racism 279). Now we see justification in nivading, punishing and expropriating the inferior -- if and when he or she violates the preferred cultural practice. European states were considered sovereign

What is globalism? Manfred Steger suggests "an Anglo-American market ideology that reached its zenith in the 1990s and was inextricably  linked to the rising fortunes of neo-liberal political forces  in the world's  sole remaining superpower" (281). Interested with reducing costs and increasing gains under the rhetoric of developing the underdeveloped. Who is more or less human is less important than people who can work and consume, disregarding their religious beliefs, their skin color, their sexuality

Decolonial cosmopolitanism/Cosmo-polis of the future: composed of communal nodes around the planet cooperating rather than competing with each other , and there will be no node that envisions itself extending  all over the planet in a grand cosmopolitan mission (planetary anthropos and European humanitas); what are the needs and demands being expressed around the world?Your location in the colonial matrix of power shapes the way you look at the world.  To what extend cosmopolitan localism may lead to a polycentric and noncapitalist world is still a question (294).

Comments from DeStigter: 8/8/12

Anyway, you're right that I was the one who recommended Walter Mignolo's
The Darker Side of Western Modernity. I've long been interested in
Walter's work, ever since I took a class with him on Latin American
literacy when I was a grad student at Michigan. Back then he was doing
work that looked at language systems in ancient Central and South America,
with an eye toward deconstructing modernist claims that literacy (as the
Europeans defined it) led to more rational and sophisticated thinking.

His most recent book on Western Modernity I thought might be of interest
to you because I think that Walter's critique of modernity as having a
colonialist imperative might be relevant to your thinking about genocide.
More specifically, I was wondering whether modernity's emphasis on
rationalistic forms of control might be a framework that creates
circumstances leading to and attempts to justify genocide. To be sure,
genocide happened in ancient cultures–I'm thinking, now, of the Israelites
genocidal invasion of Palestine under Joshua, etc. Still, I think in
modern times, one might say that genocide is a method or strategy of
imposing control over what some people see as the premodern, primitive,
unruly, ungovernable Other. Genocide seen in this way would amount to a
purging of whatever doesn't fit within or cannot be controlled under
rationalistic systems of thought and social organization.

Regarding Walter's wariness of critical theory and Gramsci, my reading is
that Walter is suspicious of all forms of Western European thought,
whether that be classical liberalism or Marxism. Instead, it seems to me
that Walter is interested in honoring local forms of thought that are
based in specific non-European communities, and any kind of ideology
imported from Europe, even a Marxist perspective like Gramsci's, is going
to be seen by Walter as potentially colonialistic in that it imposes on
indigenous communities certain (modernist) ways of viewing/constructing
the world .

I agree with you that Walter's writing is sometimes a little opaque, but
for my money it's worth the time and effort. I say that in part because I
think so much of the critical theory and political theory that we in the
US have inherited is a product of Europe, France and Germany in
particular, and I'm attracted to the emerging scholars from Central and
South America (Mignolo among them, as was Freire) who bring what I see as
a fresh perspective.