Dialogue: the status of "experience" in working-class cultural studies.

CLASS PRIVILEGE, OPPRESSION, AND THE WORLD IN THE CLASSROOM

By Erin Smith

Lately, I have been thinking about the place of experience in a student-centered classroom. The personal histories and current preoccupations of students are a powerful motivator of learning, but they also limit and constrain what kinds of knowledge are possible.

For five years, I have been teaching an upper-level undergraduate course called Gender & Education at night at the University of Texas at Dallas. The course examines the ways educational institutions both empower individuals and reproduce social hierarchies based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. The University of Texas at Dallas is a public school emphasizing its science and technology programs, and almost half its students attend part-time while they are working and/or raising families. The average age of undergraduates is 26.

I teach in the School of General Studies, which houses interdisciplinary programs and majors. It was founded in 1975 by a visionary dean, who imagined it as a safe, supportive space for women returning to college after raising families. Its programs were flexible--allowing students to count credits accumulated from the institutions they had attended in the past--and it offered special counseling and support to students, who were facing a unique set of challenges.

From the beginning, the School of General Studies enrolled non-traditional students from all sorts of life situations--men and women, paid workers and homemakers, students from 18 to 65 and over. Although the School now more closely resembles the other academic units at UT-Dallas, its unique origins still mark the education it offers students. For example, UT-Dallas, like most science and engineering institutions, is majority male (in an era when women make up 56% of undergraduates nation-wide). (1) The graduates of the School of General Studies, however, are roughly two-thirds women.

Like most courses on gender, this class is typically 75-90% women, some returning to school after many years. Some have come because a divorce or the death of a spouse has left them primary breadwinners for their families at mid-life, a role for which their education had not prepared them.

Increasingly, classrooms like this are representative. Nationwide, over 40% of college students attend part-time. The college population has been majority female for a number of years. Although UT-D's classrooms are more racially diverse and include more international students than most, 28.1% of the college population nationally is classified as minority. (2) The diversity of the student body and the number of people who return to school repeatedly over their life course to facilitate job or career changes bring a wealth of life experience to the classroom that makes radical teaching about class, gender, and race much easier to do. The experiences of these students are some of the most effective tools I have found for teaching about education, identity, and power.

Students come to my Gender & Education class with their own educational histories, concerns about their children's educations, and heads full of rhetoric from the education President (and former Texas governor). They bring these concerns and experiences into dialogue with the theories, terms, and conceptual frameworks offered by class readings and discussion. As returning students frequently making great sacrifices to be in school, they care passionately about education and what it can do for them (if they do not always have a great deal of time to do the reading!). My goals are to enable students to reflect critically about their own educational histories and to give them the tools they need to debate educational policy issues related to class, gender, and race intelligently. If all goes well, students can make connections between the world of school and the world outside, translating the codes of homes and workplaces into the discourse of scholars and vice versa in the ways advocated by the critical pedagogues who appear on my syllabus. (3)

Sometimes we succeed.

I start the class with Barbara Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women, a readable one-volume history of women's entrance into and transformation of higher education in America, in hopes of placing ourselves as part of a larger history of debates about education and power. (4) Before discussing the historic tensions between a liberal arts and a vocational approach to education, I ask students to write about why they are in college, and place their answers in the historical spectrum of ideas. We pair a look at pictures from women's colleges in the late 19th century (fine China in the dining hall, groups of sober young women reading, closely supervised by a motherly woman) with UT-D's most recent brochure (from which my forty-something students are completely absent, replaced by happy eighteen-year-olds in UT-D sweatshirts). As a final project, students interview someone who is different from them about his/her educational experiences, analyzing them in light of class readings and discussion. Many students find that their lives and class readings are mutually informing, thereby achieving my ideal for a liberal arts education.

One of my white, female students made a connection between her life situation and the nineteenth-century college women Solomon discusses, who frequently had to choose between family and career in a way men of their generation (or our own) almost never did. A homemaker, part-time student and volunteer at her church, she was hoping for full-time work with the Methodist Church after she finished her degree. Her anger at the ways these women compromised their own vocational/ professional dreams for their families again and again led her to realize that she really wanted a different kind of job--one that would require relocating her family to wherever the governing body of the Church chose to place her. She talked with her husband, who agreed that after fifteen years of promoting his career, it was probably her turn. She was off to Divinity School the next year. An amazingly generous student, she was honest about how uncomfortable it was to see herself in this material and to let her education transform/ make a mess out of her life.

Other students found different points of contact. One white, male student was a parent volunteer in his daughter's kindergarten class the week we read Karin Martin's "Becoming a Gendered Body," a study of the way children's bodies are disciplined and gendered through the practices of preschool. (5) He reported with great intensity and passion the next class meeting about how patterns in his daughter's class replicated those in the study--boys allowed to be more active and louder, to get more of the teacher's attention, to be dressed in more practical clothes, to have less attention paid to their appearance, to control more space in the classroom, etc. He shared the article with his daughter's teacher and was planning to bring up the issue at the next PTA meeting.

There is a section of the syllabus called "Race and Class in the Classroom" which works on models for thinking about gender, class, and race as interactive systems. We read several articles by Wendy Luttrell, whose work focuses on women drop-outs who return to school later to increase their literacy. (6) A talented ethnographer, Luttrell uses the language of her working-class informants to talk about the interaction of "book knowledge" (that sanctioned by teachers and other middle-class professionals) and the "common sense" knowledge working-class men and women learn at home or on the job. This work discusses how a discourse about "teacher's pets," who most often embodied middle-class ideals about white womanhood, made learning appear to be an issue of personal affinities rather than a political question about access to social power.

One of my students, who had introduced herself to the class on the first day by saying that she was here--in part--because she wanted an education to put her on a more equal footing with her husband, connected with the white, working-class women in Luttrell's studies. Because working-class men learned their jobs through apprenticeship or some other official, credential-granting process, women typically saw their husbands as "smarter" than they were, since their own child-raising and homemaking skills were seen not as skill, but as caring of "just instinct." This student was able to locate her family in a larger social space. She and her husband emerged not as (smarter or dumber) autonomous individuals (how most Americans talk about themselves), but as inhabitants of unequal social institutions that constrain and enable their lives in specific ways.

Sometimes we don't succeed.

One class period, in an attempt to illustrate race and gender privilege in the classroom, I told my UT-Dallas students a story about my experiences teaching writing at Duke University in the early 1990s. Like many humanities graduate students, I supported myself for a number of years teaching the first-year writing course to undergraduates. One year, I supervised six first-time instructors who were teaching the same material, observing their classes several times during the semester and serving as a resource person for them. As writing teachers, we were charged with introducing undergraduates to the use of "inclusive language," a daunting undertaking at Duke in the early 1990s, since Newsweek (among others) had told them that the "politically correct" faculty on campus were ready to indoctrinate them.

A committed user and proselytizer for inclusive language, this was nonetheless my least favorite part of the semester. It took up an entire week of class time. The first day was venting/processing all of the outrage about political correctness and discussing (aided by a chapter in our text book and the guidelines mailed to me by various university presses) why it might be rhetorically wise to choose inclusive language. The second day was actual practice at using inclusive language--the nuts and bolts of the process, so to speak--based on specific examples. The whole week lacked the customary generosity of spirit I had become accustomed to from everyone in class.

I was amazed, I told my students at UT-D, to observe how differently this lesson played in different classrooms. White, male instructors had to spend very little time on it, and rarely encountered much resistance. Non-white instructors, all women, and those who were marked as gay or lesbian had a much more difficult time. Inclusive language was contentious, I explained, if the person charged with presenting it was perceived to have an axe to grind. The neutral, objective, unmarked "human being" in this scenario was white, male, and heterosexual. The rest of us just played like "special interest groups." Guidelines for using inclusive language seemed rational and authoritative from white men, but political and intellectually suspect from the rest of us.

The UT-Dallas students were baffled by this story. They got the point about gender and race privilege, but they could not imagine the classroom scenario I had just described.

"Your students argued with you?" one student asked, stunned.

I assure them that this was the case, and added that one student at the end of class asserted that "he" meant everyone, always had, and always would, regardless what anyone said. He continued by announcing that when he was out in the real world, he would make all of those women and minorities working for him write the way he told them to.

"Is this kid crazy?" one student wanted to know. "You're the teacher! Whether I agreed with you or not, if you told me to write some way, I'd write that way--I'm not an idiot."

Class had run over, and discussion had to stop there for the week.

I was stunned by this experience. We had spent over 2/3 of the semester talking about social reproduction theory, about the ways educational institutions legitimate the re-creation of social hierarchies by making differences in income and social status appear to be the result of merit. We had countless examples in class discussion and in class reading of social reproduction theories at work. We had read a wonderful article about architecture on the men's and women's campuses at Duke and the ways it transmitted gender and class privilege in its organization of social space. (7) Several students had offered great examples in class. One had volunteered that his math instructor at our community college was, in fact, a math Ph.D. student from Harvard, home moonlighting at the community college for the summer, who used the same book for teaching in both places.

"Same book," he said, "same teacher. What else are you buying if not connections to rich, powerful people and a piece of paper testifying that you are one of them?"

Others pointed out that what got you into an elite, private college was a high SAT score (which effectively measures things elite, WASP-types learn in their homes) and a good high school background (paid for in most states by property taxes). Most of them discussed social reproduction theory quite articulately on the midterm exam. Yet, here I was with a classroom full of students who were baffled by the class (and race and gender) privilege this particular Duke student possessed.

This incident, like most, was over determined. When I taught writing at Duke, I was 24 years old, had no Ph.D., and was teaching an obviously low-status class. At UT-Dallas, I had a Ph.D., was teaching less obviously low-status courses, and had more wrinkles around my eyes. The Duke student in this story was definitely more outspoken than most, but the general pattern of behavior rang true to my experience. As a general rule, I find public school kids far more docile (sometimes maddeningly so) than those at elite, private institutions, and I believe it has to do with a class- and race-based sense of entitlement.

The next week, I started off by returning to this incident. I quoted my UT-D student from the previous week ("You're the teacher! Whether I agreed with you or not, if you told me to write some way, I'd write that way"), explaining that she had an employee's way of being in the world ("In exchange for a grade or a paycheck, I will do what you teach me to do"). The Duke student had an employer's way of being in the world (he expected to tell other people--especially women and minority people--what to do). He had a great deal of help getting that way, I explained. Students at Duke are required to take a certain number of seminars, classes of 15 people of less that meet in one of the countless seminar rooms that dot Duke's campus. The architecture at Duke, I explained, let that student know that the world was entitled to his opinion, that what he had to say mattered, that he--in fact--had a duty to develop some educated opinions and to defend them publicly. Duke (about $25,000 a year) gave him the opportunity to practice. UT-Dallas (about $6,000 a year), like most budget-strapped state schools, has one seminar room for the Arts and Humanities where graduate classes meet. Our classroom--50 chairs in crowded rows facing forward at me and a blackboard--told UTD students that it was their job to write down what they were told and reproduce it later. There was no call for them to say anything at all. (Or so the arrangement of their physical space suggested. I had exhausted myself suggesting otherwise).

Although individuals can resist the structures of the institutions they inhabit (we read bell hooks; we read Paolo Freire; we discuss and debate; we break up into smaller groups; we move the chairs to a more participatory arrangement), these institutions nonetheless exercise a powerful, if often invisible, shaping force on all of our lives. Making class privilege visible in institutions always already structured by it is no easy task.

I was most struck by my students' conviction that the irate Duke student in question must be crazy. Class reproduction was so complete and so invisible that my UT-D students could not explain privileged behavior (in spite of a semester of critical tools that might have helped) in any way except that this boy was just nuts. They did not see themselves as having learned a particular (working-class? middle manager? hireling?) way-of-being in the world from their schools, homes, and jobs; everyone was like them (of they were nuts).

For the record, class and class privilege were no more visible at Duke. Although Duke students, too, grasped social reproduction theory intellectually, few were aware of speaking from a position of privilege, or recognized the ways it might shape their ideas or ways of being in the world. They, too, assumed that everyone was just like them.

On some level, my students were right. Everyone they met was like them. The first day of class in Gender & Education, students introduce themselves with their personal educational histories. More often than not, with the exception of international students, everyone is a public school kid from Texas. Class and class privilege are so hard to make visible, because we mostly inhabit homogeneous institutions, socialize with people who share our class background, and are in no way encouraged by public discourse to think of ourselves as having class identities at all. Because our students are so effectively sorted by class before they walk through the doors of our institutions, their own experience (however great an asset in a student-centered classroom) is inadequate to make concrete the abstract theories about class reproduction that inform so much of our own scholarly lives. Further, in a global world, the "working class" is frequently elsewhere--Singapore, China--and unless there are some vocal international students in class, the sum total of the experience in the classroom will never add up to an adequate understanding of global capitalism.

I'll hand the conclusion of this meditation to Joan Scott, who published an essay called "Experience" in 1991, in which she addressed the problematic nature of experience as a foundation for knowledge, although it had been immensely productive and empowering for many outsiders in the academy by the early 1990s. (8) Scott writes:

   When experience is taken as the
   origin of knowledge, the vision
   of the individual subject (the
   person who had the experience
   or the historian who recounts it)
   becomes the bedrock of evidence
   upon which the explanation is
   built. Questions about the constructed
   nature of the experience,
   about how subjects are constructed
   in the first place, about how
   one's vision is structured--about
   language (of discourse) and history--are
   left side. (25)

In other words, a reliance on experience can effectively locate individuals in history (especially those previously left out), but it cannot--by itself-enable individuals to see history in themselves. The challenge for me in teaching class in the classroom is to make clear how institutions and narratives construct us, even as we are engaged in the joint process of (re)creating them.

WORKING-CLASS CULTURAL STUDIES IN THE UNIVERSITY

By Lawrence Hanley

Despite their fractious debates, radical critics in the United States have traditionally shared a common understanding of "culture" as "a developed and completely harmonious system of knowledge and of art in all material and spiritual fields of work" (Trotsky 48). Until the past couple of decades, radicals essentially agreed with what we now call, by shorthand, an Arnoldian sense of culture as the best that has been thought, spoken, and recorded. Thus battles within the left, as for instance in the struggles in the 1930s over proletarian literature, often hinged less on redefining culture than on the correct relation between "bourgeois" works of art and an emerging "revolutionary" canon of similar artifacts. Culture in its anthropological senses, as in Raymond Williams' fine phrase a "whole way of life," was largely irrelevant to radicals. The absence of this sense of "culture" indicates the extent to which, for generations of American radicals, categories like "proletarian" or "working-class" were political, rather than cultural, identities. Rather than being the grounds of class identity and difference, "culture," like the State, or the means of production, was something to be seized or smashed by the radical social movements.

The invisibility of culture as the everyday medium or common sense through which class identities are made and remade also helps to account for the difficulties that radicals often faced when struggling to understand the complexities posed by race and gender. Lacking firm mediations between economy and politics, radicals' approach to race, for instance, veered between an internal colonization paradigm, viewing race as a "special case" of capitalist development (thus producing the famous "Black Belt" or "nation within a nation" thesis), and calls for class unity over race difference, an optimistic but usually ineffective form of voluntarism. Without some analytical framework to understand the imaginary, but real, bases of race and racial difference, radicals often found it difficult to grasp the racialized mediations between class-in-itself and class-for itself that gummed up both nationalist and "class-based multiracial unity" (Foley 187) approaches to race and class. Today, of course, culture is everywhere. Postmodernity, Frederic Jameson notes, is characterized by "a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life can be said to have become 'cultural' in some original and yet untheorized sense" (48). The current moment has largely reversed the oppositions that governed traditional radical thinking on politics and culture: politics itself, in the form of "identity politics" or "new social movements," has been reorganized around issues of culture and cultural identity. Ironically, "cultural studies," for example, which grew out of efforts in Britain to understand and champion a rapidly changing post-war working class, has almost completely abandoned "class" as a central category of interest or analysis. In providing a "User's Guide" to the massive anthology that announced cultural studies' arrival on the American academic scene, the editors of Cultural Studies (Grossberg, et al) divide their volume into categories like: the history of cultural studies, gender and sexuality, nationhood and national identity colonialism and postcolonialism, race and ethnicity, popular culture, identity politics, global culture, etc. In its guide, Cultural Studies offers a concise map of the enormous, exciting changes and tensions that are currently remaking literature, communications, history, art, and other humanities departments across the country. There is however no signpost on this map for class or for the working class. The "Americanization" of cultural studies has been accompanied by gains and losses: just as cultural studies achieved institutional legitimacy, it seemed to refuse the deep, serious engagement with class and the working-class that had fueled its original ambitions and excitement (McRobbie 722). On the other hand, class plays the starring role in the new "working-class studies" being developed in places like Youngstown State's Center for Working-Class Studies, Women's Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. These efforts grow out of a frustration with contemporary multiculturalism's apparent silence on matters of class. The problem with the arrival of multiculturalism, Tim Libretti notes, is that "the category of class is not overtly articulated in these new literary historical taxonomies" (23). Thus, instead of suppressing class identities, working-class studies proposes to become a site "for analyzing the intersection of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation" (Christopher et al, "Editorial" 7). To advance into academic legitimacy working-class critics adopt the conceptual tools left behind by multiculturalism in its struggle to enter the academy. From within the multicultural paradigm working-class identity is a legacy, an "inheritance," or an "ambiguous gift (Zandy, "Introduction" 1) that must be recovered. As terms like these indicate identity is understood less as a social position or process than as a product of shared norms, values, lifestyles, and attitudes; working-class identity reflects identification with a coherent, bounded, integrated and integrating working-class culture. The chief avenue for recovering and validating working-class identity, as in dominant versions multiculturalism, lies in exposure to the (anti)canons, (counter)traditions, works, and authors which embody this culture.

How all this works can be glimpsed in an anecdote offered by Constance Coiner. Margaret, a white working-class student in one of Coiner's classes, has consistency expressed resentment toward multiculturalism. After the class reads Denise Giardini's contemporary novel about coal mining and class strife, Storming Heaven, Margaret identifies her own family's past with the novel's working-class characters. If this is what multiculturalism is all about, Margaret declares to her teacher, "I'm going to have to reconsider the whole thing" (47). "What is obvious here," Coiner explains, "is that Margaret needs to learn about her heritage as much as Darrell needs to learn about his, as much as Sulan needs to learn about hers [Darrell and Sulan are African-American students]. And Margaret needs to find that heritage in literary texts, just as Darrell and Sulan need to find their heritage in literary texts" (47). The effects of such a discovery may be political, though political and social change are not rationales commonly found in the new "working-class studies." If class tends to drop out of cultural studies, working-class studies tends to culturalize class by backgrounding social structures and antagonisms and foregrounding elements of an organic, integrated way of life. Short of chiding Cultural Studies for cutting an important corner from the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and of scolding "working-class studies" for denying the "last instances" of the social and economic, something that others have already in fact done (Murdock; Clarke), how can we start to resolve this endemic tension between class politics and cultural identity without surrendering real progress accomplished in the "multicultural" moment? One route may be to first consider the current locations of working-class culture and its representations as they are taken up by intellectuals and academics. Until the 1940s and 50s, "literary" authority belonged to critics, anthologists, reviewers, and writers, the "last intellectuals" as Russell Jacoby has called them. Today, "literary" authority belongs more clearly to the University and is most often reckoned in terms of syllabi, curricula, and textbooks. With some exceptions, representations of social difference gain authority as they are institutionalized within the intellectual and pedagogical fields of the University. Recognition of this historical shift and institutional relocation needs to playa larger role in contemporary cultural studies. The ways, for instance, that working-class literature has been transformed, via multiculturalism, into an academic subject points to the need for a closer look at the function of working-class literature within the University.

As John Guillory has recently argued, multiculturalism's attachment to expressive notions of culture and to a liberal pluralist politics tends to repress an analysis of the distinctions between university and society, or "of what the 'political' means in the context of school as an institution (9). The institutional function of school, as Pierre Bourdieu and his American followers have argued, hinges on its role in distributing and redistributing cultural capital to sustain social distinction and class hierarchy. In Guillory's analysis, then, the "canon wars" associated with multiculturalism are really being waged not around visions of a more inclusive society or oppression by "dead white males" but around the recomposition of cultural capital for the University's main constituency: the professional-managerial class.

Revolutions in syllabi and curricula can come and go, as they have for the past century, so long as the University continues to reproduce class structures and relations by reproducing cultural capital--the cultural taste, languages, and knowledges that serve to distinguish the proper and the "high" from the vulgar and the "low." Pressures from above (an increasing linguistic fragmentation in technical and professional languages) and below (the increasing pervasiveness of mass culture) have, according to Guillory, displaced the "literary syllabus" from its privileged role of reproducing a "vernacular standard" for the professional-managerial class and, hence, have precipitated the current "crisis of the humanities." This reconversion of cultural capital thus explains the ironies of multiculturalism's insurgent ambitions: from one perspective, so long as it remains confined within the institutional boundaries of curriculum and syllabus, canon-busting represents a fortification of bourgeois cultural distinction. The ironies of institutionalizing working-class literature in service to the multicultural renovation of the ruling class cultural capital hardly need to be underscored here. More central to the problems facing working-class studies is the issue of how the multicultural strategy, by focusing its efforts on fuller cultural representation and integration, mystifies the social work of the University. Thus, for instance, the importance in working-class studies of encouraging students to "self-identify" as working-class preserves a kind of idealized image of the University, not only as an antagonist to ideologies of "classlessness" that dominate students extramural lives but also as a sanctioned refuge for ideals of diversity and inclusion. While the difference(s) offered by a multiculturalized University may promote consciousness of injustice, prejudice, or inequity, because these problems are defined largely in cultural, or representational, terms they rarely pose obstacles or conflicts to the consolidation of, or ascension into, the professional-managerial class. This discrepancy founds what Guillory calls multiculturalism's "field of 'imaginary' politics" (7), a field defined both by its attention to oppression and resistance and by a repressed consciousness of its own participation in the reproduction of class relations.

In her critique of multiculturalism, Hazel Carby has pointed to this same disjuncture in the institutionalization of writing by black women. Multiculturalism's obsession with "constructing" identities and with the power of "difference" have largely played themselves out in white, middle-class institutions and classrooms. "Black texts," Carby argues, have thus been employed within the University "to focus on the complexity of response in the (white) reader/student's construction of self in relation to a (black) perceived 'other'; the text has been reduced to a tool to motivate that response" (12). Given the institutional location of multiculturalism's representation of racial difference, Carby writes: "Black cultural texts have become fictional substitutes for the lack of any sustained social or political relationships with black people in a society that retains many of its historical practices of apartheid in housing and schooling" (11-12). There's no reason why working-class literature shouldn't fulfill a similar function of, as Richard Ohmann, once phrased it, "sanction[ing] all kinds of nonthreatening nonconformity" (25). Far from being an unfortunate oversight or glitch, the disconnect between Carby's "text" and "society," or the displacements performed by the use of representations, are a specific and necessary effect of the University's social function. In the end, Guillory and Carby are responding to the question of what difference multiculturalism makes where and for whom.

What multiculturalism lacks, and what working-class studies needs, is a fuller sense of racial, or class, formation, particularly of the kind that links social structure and textual, of cultural, representation. One final way of understanding multiculturalism's "field of 'imaginary' politics" that has more general implications for working-class studies can be found in Michael Omi and Howard Winant's work on racial formation. There, Omi and Winant posit "racial formation" as a process of linking structure and representation. "Racial projects" are those particular historical efforts to articulate structure and representation into coherent, if provisional, correspondence. Thus, Omi and Winant write:

   A racial project is simultaneously
   an interpretation, representation,
   or explanation of racial
   dynamics, and an effort to reorganize
   and redistribute resources
   along racial lines. Racial projects
   connect what race means
   in a particular discursive practice
   and the ways in which both
   social structures and everyday
   experiences are racially organized,
   based upon that meaning.
   (56)

Omi and Winant's notion of racial formation allows us to see, then, that given its academic base, multiculturalism belongs to a professional-managerial class formation; even as it mobilizes largely affirmative images of difference, it articulates these representations to a particular social structure, namely the distribution of cultural capital and social power through the credentializing of the professional-managerial class. More importantly, rather than constituting a break with previous moments of racial representation, a break often figured as a move beyond "stereotypes" of into "self-representation," multiculturalism belongs, despite its affirmative intentions, to a long history of appropriating, managing, and capitalizing difference. Where and for whom images of the working-class circulate needs then to be both an integral component of working-class studies' self-consciousness and an object of its critical efforts. More and better representations of working-class life won't make a difference if they circulate in the same places with the same effects.

Understanding the value and meaning of something like "working-class literature" needs to involve for instance, a series of difficult questions about the realities of its circulation: when working-class writing becomes "literature," how does it reward writers with connections to new audiences and alienation from other readers and readings? Writing "literature" implies what kinds of readers doing what kinds of things to a writer's narratives? In short, what social relations are altered by the circuits of cultural capital when (working-class) writing becomes (bourgeois) "literature"? Working-class writing, whether written by, for, of about the working class, is almost always writing driven to distraction by these anxieties about its own legitimacy and value. Following Guillory and Carby, proponents of a multiculturalized working-class literature must think their project through two necessarily linked questions: (minority) representation for whom? greater access to what (curriculum)? In other words, how do minority representations ultimately function within the university? And, how does more "diverse" literary representation correspond to, or not correspond to, minority access to the university?

Seeking answers to these questions might encourage us to see that the University itself needs to become a site of political struggle, not just over representations, but also over ways of making and certifying knowledge, pedagogies, and over the means of access for working-class students. Working-class students enter the University, when they do, as already cultured and classed beings, as "people with experiences, with backgrounds, with linguistic resources" (Fox, Social Uses 20). Working-class identity, conceived as ongoing process, rather than recoverable product, might serve both as a source of knowledge and as a way to interrupt the traditional social relations of education and pedagogy. Acknowledging the creativity and expertise of working-class people, curricula and syllabi might become occasions for collaboration, and the University might eschew its traditional work of sorting, standardizing, and conforming in favor of producing new, critical knowledges and subjects.

Three-quarters of the students at the college where I teach are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. By any definition, they are overwhelmingly working-class. This experience, however, rarely condenses into a discrete, recoverable "heritage." Eduardo, a student in one of my American Studies courses, for instance, is a punk rocker who works in a hotel kitchen. His father is Ecuadorian; his mother is Dominican. Eduardo tells me that he's happy to have escaped Camden, New Jersey, where he spent most of high school years, for the relative peace and quiet of Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx. While he's a devoted fan of Rancid and the Dropkick Murphys (a hardcore, militant working-class punk band from South Boston), Eduardo and I sometimes trade compact discs of the latest son music from Cuba. Eduardo tells me he can relate to and enjoy the Latino literature course he's taking this semester, but he's also eager to tell me about the classes he's taking this semester on film noir and liberation theology. (Both his parents are evangelical Christians. This significant alienation from their native cultures and tradition supplies an important subtext for their emigration to El Norte.) Clearly Eduardo's porous, syncretic, and dynamic cultural and social experience would only confound the multicultural paradigm, with its need for coherent bounded cultures and "heritages."

Eduardo is also upwardly mobile. His matriculation at City College is a conscious, if hard-fought, stepping away from his working-class home, neighborhood, and experience. College for him is an initiation into an alien world; this is perception he shares with most of his professors. Confronted by working-class students like Eduardo, radical teachers might typically ask: what cultural identity can be preserved or salvaged against the backdrop of the university's relentless work of reproducing bourgeois status and social hierarchy? This question, however, not only implies a simplification of Eduardo's experience, it also misses an important opportunity to challenge the ideologies and epistemologies that underwrite the university's work of reproducing class difference. Instead of viewing ourselves as merely supplying textual opportunities for working-class students to re-appreciate their experience or thinking about successful learning as the proper reception of syllabus-sanctioned texts, what if we viewed working-class students as the producers of new knowledges? Our work, in this view, would be closer to developing what Antonio Gramsci called organic intellectuals, intellectuals who transform their subordinate experience into insurgent knowledge.

My American Studies class includes a unit on genre and on the power of cultural genres to shape both our perceptions of the social world and our self-perceptions. The particular genre we analyze is the "immigrant narrative" or American bildung. The first task is to figure out how this genre works its way into and through a variety of disparate texts. We read fiction and poetry by writers like Anzia Yezierska, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Gary Soto, and Garrett Hongo. We analyze films like Crossover Dreams (1985), Avalon (1990), and Neuba Yol (1996). And we end this part of the unit by reading Richard Rodriguez's meta-memoir, Speak Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1983). The questions that drive our reading of these texts are analytical: what narrative patterns constitute the core plot of the American bildung? What is the character system that generates the genre's protagonist(s) and antagonist(s)? What are the motifs that often signal membership in the genre? What are the variations on the grammar of the bildung's generic plot? The overarching question here is: how does the American bildung offer a convenient, functional, and useful set of resources for transforming social and historical experience into cultural recognition? This leads of course into questions of how this narrative transformation also encodes particular ideological values and pleasures.

The second part of our work on immigrant narratives, however, asks students to collect stories from their neighborhoods and families. Armed with tape recorders, my students seek out relatives and peers, asking them to describe how they made the passage from place to place and how they experience the displacements involved in migration. The students transcribe these stories and then compare them to the generic narrative that we've pieced together from literary and filmic representations. Thus, a new set of questions becomes relevant: to what extent are these vernacular narratives shaped by more powerful generic narratives? How do these narratives expose silences and omissions in the dominant, generic narrative? How consonant are the ideological values and pleasures between the two kinds of narrative? What function does vernacular narrative seem to fulfill for its tellers? After an initial surprise at the strong points of identity between generic and vernacular stories, students are quick to notice how the stories they've collected often exceed the American bildung and, so, question its power to capture and signify the social experience of migration.

In this unit, students are learning about one of the most cherished of literary institutions--genre. Yet studying the generic inflections of stories from local neighborhoods, families, and friends also helps to demonstrate that there is no "experience" there to be recovered in some pure, original form; experience is always already shaped by narrative forms and by the ideologies more or less encoded within these forms. But there's something more at stake in this project. Working within vernacular narratives means bringing this new, cultural material into the academy and taking these representations seriously as sources of new knowledge, knowledge that often complicates and relativizes academic knowledge. As the organic intellectuals in control of making this knowledge, students who normally experience their liminal status--one foot planted in the university and one foot planted in their neighborhoods and communities--as a liability are able to convert this liminality into an asset. This process opens up the possibility for new subjectivities, but it also redraws the classroom as a site for the emergence of new forms of cultural capital, forms which are not exclusively grounded in the authority of academic knowledge or of subaltern experience. Of course, one classroom can't overturn the ideological apparatus of higher education. (And we need, as radical teachers, to starting thinking beyond the classroom, the course, and the syllabus to understand our work in terms of broader institutional structures and arrangements.) However, seeing students as organic intellectuals who can produce new knowledges helps to interrupt the logic of upward mobility and social reproduction by undermining the dichotomy of school and "street" that dais logic depends on.

Finally, to return to programmatic issue of "working-class cultural studies," my argument implies that we need to worry less about putting "class," in some textual incarnation, back into the "User's Guide" of cultural studies and more about the relations between the ways and places that cultural studies has been institutionalized. In a late essay, written n response to the emergence of "cultural studies" as an academic field, Raymond Williams described how, "in the very effort to define a clearer subject, to establish a discipline, to bring order into the work--all of which are laudable ambitions--the real problem of the project [of cultural studies] as a whole, which is that people's questions are not answered by the existing distribution of the educational curriculum, can be forgotten" (169). The "Americanization" of cultural studies has largely been the story of its growth in certain, select institutions; the questions that have driven its growth in the United States have belonged to the particularly classed location of these institutions.

As Williams points out at the beginning of his essay, innovations like Cultural Studies, or for a preceding generation, literary studies itself, "occurred outside the formal educational institutions," in adult education or amongst educationally disenfranchised women (169). The way to put "class" back into cultural studies is to pay more attention to those places where educational institutions impinge on working-class experience, often producing the kinds of contradictions, frustrations, resentments, and withdrawals chronicled by writers from Thomas Hardy to Jack Conroy to Ernesto Quinones, each of whom has contributed to a staple genre of working-class literature--the narrative of failed cultural ambition. In other words, working-class cultural studies needs to begin with working-class people's demands on institutions, curricula, syllabi, and pedagogy. In previous decades, these demands were likely to be explicit and unavoidable--student takeovers, protests, and manifestos. Today, they more likely to be expressed through acts and arts of omission: silence, withdrawal, and boredom. This resistance is everywhere in the American higher educational system, but like working-class students, it's concentrated in places far removed from top tier public and private universities and colleges. These are places, incidentally, where proletarian student bodies are most likely to be taught by proletarianized, part-time, contingent faculty. It's here that the contradictions of class and culture find their fullest, most immediate expression. And, it's here that working-class cultural studies needs to find its enabling problems, its urgency, and its politics.

NOTES:

(1) For up-to-date statistics on undergraduates nationwide, see The Chronicle of Higher Education 2002-03 Almanac Issue, available on-line at http://www.chronide.com.

(2) Chronicle of Higher Education 2002-03 Almanac Issue, http:// www.chronicle.com.

(3) See, especially, Shirley Brice Heath, Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (New York: Cambridge UP, 1983); bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice Of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994); Lorene Cary, Black Ice (New York: Vintage, 1991); Peggy Orenstein, Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-esteem, and the Confidence Gap (New York: Doubleday 1994).

(4) Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985).

(5) Karin A. Martin, "Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschools," American Sociological Review 63.4 (1998): 494-511.

(6) Wendy Luttrell, "'The Teachers, They All Had Their Pets": Concepts of Gender, Knowledge, and Power," Signs 18.1 (1993): 505-41; and "Working Class Women's Ways of Knowing: Effects of Gender, Race, and Class" in Education and Gender Equality, ed. Julia Wrigley (Washington D. C.: Falmer P, 1992): 173-92.

(7) Annabel Wharton, "Gender, Architecture, and Institutional Self-Presentation: The Case of Duke University," South Atlantic Quarterly 90.1 (Winter 1991): 175-217.

(8) Joan W. Scott, "Experience," rpt. in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992): 22-40.

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ERIN A. SMITH is assistant professor of American Studies, Literature, and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her first book is Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadephia: Temple UP, 2000). Her current research focuses on literature and popular religion in America.

LAWRENCE HANLEY teaches at the City College of New York and edits Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.