History and practice 2004.

"The past isn't dead; it isn't even past": It probably isn't a great sign that we feel compelled to introduce this special book review issue of Radical Teacher with some musings on history and practice written by the notoriously pessimistic Southern writer, William Faulkner. But who else is up to the task of catching our mood during a U.S. election season that has found numerous liberals (and dare we say, even some radicals) insisting that we must all embrace some very conventional ideas about white male valor (i.e. swift boat captaincy in Vietnam) as a way of stemming the tide of what in this electoral moment has appeared as a right-wing revisionist hijacking of John Kerry's Vietnam service? That Americans are once again fighting (over) the Vietnam War--and especially the widespread opposition to that war, spurred by the heroism of veterans compelled to rethink their service--in the 2004 electoral context has reminded us yet again of how the past shapes and is shaped by the present. Feeling obliged to defend, even glorify, Kerry's war record in Vietnam, with little space left for a critique of that war's racism, of the horror of all war, and so on, has left many of us feeling as if we are (again, borrowing from Faulkner) in that "dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which you cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith."

These words belong to Rosa Coldfield, one of the insane narrators of Faulkner's insane masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom!, a work that is defined by its insistence that what we call the "present" is not really that different from what we call the "past." What Faulkner's characters "do" in the present is always quite legibly either an attenuated or apotheosized (to pick two Faulknerian words that don't even get us past "a" in the alphabet) form of some practice of the past. But in the midst of the craziness that is Absalom, Absalom!--the impossibility of constructing a linear narrative out of the tangled threads that make up the book--there are a couple of characters, Quentin Compson and his Canadian college friend Shreve, who insist on at least trying to make some sense out of it all. Now, of course, RT readers who already done the assigned reading--and we know you have-know that Quentin is doomed. His inability to make sense of it all leads him to commit suicide in another Faulkner novel, The Sound and the Fury. (Full disclosure: Quentin's suicidal depression has other roots too).

The crazy deja-vu-all-over-again moment of our own lives in the United States has made us more sympathetic than ever to Quentin Compson's plight. When the past keeps repeating, worse and worse each time (Gulf War II and "Disenfranchising Black Voters in Florida--The '04 Tour" makes this last statement merely descriptive, not hyperbolic) it does feel more and more necessary to explore how we put history into practice and practice into history. What we mean is that at a time when misinformation is the official language of the land, it might becomes particularly important for teachers to speak and write clearly and truthfully about the things that matter and how they got that way.

In a modest attempt to participate in that practice, the editorial collective of Radical Teacher decided to turn over the bulk of this issue to a particularly excellent set of book reviewers. This decision grew from the realization that we had, in the past few months, collected an especially sharp and thoughtful set of reviews, all of which touch on the question of how history and current pedagogical practices constitute each other. The last time we turned over the main part of an issue to book reviews (African American Studies at Y2K) the collective was pleased both by the process of putting together the effort and by the response we got to it. Now, as then, the aim is to be "suggestive" and not comprehensive.

One of the most interesting concerns to rise up out of these reviews is the question of how teachers have been situated, historically, in the larger context of labor in the United States, and what they can (or should) do from that position. This crops up most visibly in Daniel Opler's excellent review of books about two teachers' strikes of the late 1960s and early 1970s--both of which revolved around the question of what kind of "management" teachers do, inside and outside the classroom. But the question also plays out in interesting and significant ways in Chris Green's review of books about Southern radical educators Don West and Myles Horton, in Rebecca Barrett Fox's review of historian Mark Naison's memoir, as well as in Terry Caesar's consideration of Corryne McSherry's book on intellectual property. Opler, for instance, nicely underscores Jerrold Podair's insight about how centrally the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers strike was shot through with differing understandings of what it means to be a teacher. Caesar, for his part, helps us to see how this very same historical question plays out in the university in our own moment, as we are faced daily with the question of what we call "work": Is making a syllabus labor? Who owns it? And all of this is framed nicely by James Spady's look at the broad-based survey of American labor history, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend.

"Naming" is of central concern to a number of the books under review here, a point that is emphasized by many of the reviewers. Sandra Dahlberg, for instance, wants readers to pay special attention to how the naming of "composition studies" represents a crucial moment in the ongoing evolution of university English departments and invites us to consider how that very naming at once takes the measure of an academic history that de-privileges the teaching of composition and insists that the time has come for a new reckoning. In a similar vein, Molly Swiger writes intriguingly of Gerald Graff's own recent coinage, "arguespeak," a term that Graft offers up as a "revelation" of sorts--a true naming of what it is that so many teachers really want their students to learn after all. Finally, both Jim Smethurst and Cheryl Higashida use their reviews of books on Left literature to remind us of how the complexities of race, class, and nation have all conspired in the past to create an overly simplified canon of the radical arts.

We are pleased with the serendipitous way that these reviews share an interest in uncovering the myriad ways that history shapes current pedagogical practices and how those practices, in turn, shape our understanding of history. In addition to the confluence of content we are utterly gratified with the uniform clarity and thoughtfulness of these contributions. Most of these reviewers are new to the pages of Radical Teacher and all bring such obvious gifts to the table. It is not a given that book reviewers--considering the short pace allotted to them and the constraints built into the form itself (i.e. writing about someone else's work)--will always be able to articulate their analysis of the books in question in a competent way and leave enough room for their own exceptional voices to shine through. But from Daniel Opler's sharp-eyed, strong-voiced take on two very different approaches to teachers' strikes, to Chris Green's unabashed praise of the poetry of Don West, we lucky readers get some real sense, in this issue, of the people behind the reviews.

Subjectivity is the crux of many of these reviews. How lucky we are at Radical Teacher to get to know, at least a little bit, at a distance, so many smart and passionate educators. Just one more example of the power of a union.