Confronting Modernity in the English Classroom

Genocide and the idea of teaching about something that  is clearly "something bad" that should not happen does not offer much to argue about. Yet, when I learned about genocide in 2005 and began teaching about 21st century genocides that same year, I discovered that the word "genocide" and how it is used does, in fact, open space for argument.  At NCTE, I am presenting the curriculum for the English 459 course I teach at UIC, developed with colleagues, about troubling tradition and re-imagining the English classroom. The idea is to have an introductory course that supports new teachers as we first trouble the idea that our job is to teach a novel or a period in literature and then imagine the discomfort of doing something different.  What would it mean to teach and learn English if there were no "right" answer to bubble in? I'm in my third year of my doctorate, which focuses on re-imagining the English classroom as a place of raising global consciousness and participation. The starting point for the project is literature of atrocities, specifically genocide, but the idea is how we can use Illinois' 2005 mandate to teach about genocide as a call for reconsidering the materials and topics we are using to teach reading and writing. This idea is, of course, troubling for many traditional English teachers, but in the classes I teach at UIC and DePaul for new teachers, we are beginning to plant the seed for change.

English classrooms have been teaching the Diary of Anne Frank and Eli Wiesel's Night for years, but English as a subject in schools woefully has neglected the topic of genocide and has engaged in little theorizing about "genocide," meaning its rhetorical nature to evoke a distanced terror, that which is unimaginable and unspeakable. English seems reluctant to confront this significant history and possibility of modern society with an even greater resistance to collaborating with each other and the academy to ascertain what the English classroom should be doing to cultivate a globally conscious and literate discipline. I suggest that not only is genocide within the purview of current intentions of the teaching of English in middle and high schools but that English needs to confront modernity and genocide as inherent in the logic of modernity to fulfill its promise to represent and critique the world we inhabit, to "read" the word and the world (who said this). The English classroom can expose ideology in what we read and participate in future new thinking about human society by what we say, write, create, and do. It is appropriate for English to include genocide in the continuing attempt to close in on what language does and how it is appropriated in narrative and argument.There are several paradigms of English that show how genocide can be one way we can begin to problematize modernity.

Given that genocide is retrievable only in narrative and cultural reconstructions, issues of testimony and representation parallel controversy over the inadequacy of memory, the tensions of truth, and the  telling of history.  English can incorporate diverse perspectives that complicate national stereotyping and simplistic accounts. The English classroom can do its own study of the cultural, historical and social structural factors so capable of replication because of what Mignolo calls the rhetoric of modernity using the logic of coloniality. Texts do this work, enact this rhetoric and logic. English is not incapable of examining social and structural components of the genocidal environment or how genocidal  structural components like making texts that make a society "legible" (Scott) and the texts in the "discourse of measurement" (Cintron) similarly practice rhetorics of modernity and the logic of coloniality. English would read beyond the protagonists and antagonists of genocide to penetrate the gaps and fissures (Bakhtin)  that seemingly separated participants -- what of that empty space between narratives? Instead of telling the story of hegemony or the story of perpetrator and victim, the emphasis can be on patterns of reciprocity of relations (Ortner 1984, 157), exposing the dialectical aspects of the context of genocide and the context, the telling of genocide, and the public use of the language of genocide.

To learn about that which we did not bear witness puts us in the position of listener and a distanced witness to an atrocity. To hear about genocide, similarly puts us at a distance to witness how the word is appropriated in rhetorical terms. This transactional space is dependent on the problematic of testimony and the narrative construction of "truth." English is concerned with this space and understands that "truth" is always constructed by language, symbols of exchange, and that in language the symbols of exchange are only truly communicated when the beings exchanging these symbols are of equal status. I think it is fair to say that no two beings will every come to that transactional space equal, and so the narrative construction is always a representation, always in motion, and always a problematic of referentiality. Langer talks about Holocaust testimony as represented reality, and I think it is fair to say that all testimony is a represented reality that seeks to make legible that which is unimaginable. Language is a way of ordering that past in the present, and author must render his testimony as a survivor or the heard testimony of a survivor (as the author-witness); such a rendering requires that the author fill the gaps in memory, invent a narratorial voice, make legible chaotic fragments using Langer's literary imagination:  the literature of atrocities. The author and the reader then share this transactional space and must grapple with the problematic in the referential inadequacy of the testimonial text. Bakhtin's heteroglossia might explain why the discipline of English can best unravel the intertwining of the literary and historical, for there is no one version of events, no singular truth.

In the English classroom, there is no one authority, yet all texts seek to construct authority while at the same time considering the fact that the empirical link between experience and narrative will be lost in literary construction. There is a danger of relativism in the transactional space, that all voices or all interpretations may become equally valid. That said, I think the transactional space of an English is well aware of the power of language to move people to action and to influence ideology. The classroom is a place to talk about the danger of relativism in regard to this replicable chapter in human history. The structural aspects of the story of a genocide do complicate "truth" as such, but the representation is enough to demonstrate the rhetoric of modernity in action and the replicable chapter in human history in which students can write.

By facing the distanced terror and reading the unimaginable, the English classroom can capitalize on its unique perspective on narrative frameworks and reliance on texts in pursuit of revealing rhetoric of modernity. The connection between discourse systems -- discourse of measurement, discourse of narrative -- would stimulate increased theorizing about genocide but also about English curriculum. By increasing awareness of pregenocidal conditions brought on by modernity, we and our students become obliged to demystify the ideology used to justify atrocities, the same ideology of development that has distorted democracy. Students can be globally literate citizens who can see the value of ambiguity and gaps in some narratives and the danger in others as residents of Western modernity living in the logic of coloniality.