Mediating politics and aesthetics in multiethnic literary pedagogy.

"Doing literature" will never be equivalent to "doing politics" out there in the "real-world." It is not the same as lobbying for legislative changes or school reform. It is not the same as staging boycotts or demonstrations. It is not the same as working in soup kitchens or domestic violence shelters. It is not even the same as literacy tutoring or developing written documents for non-profit organizations. But why would we want literary studies to be/do these practices exclusively? As multiethnic literary specialists, it is incumbent upon us to carve out the niche for multiethnic literature in cultural politics. That is, we must decide what is unique to multiethnic literature that makes its work valuable and relevant. (1)

In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Martha Nussbaum considers the relationship between liberal education and citizenship, or the "cultivation of humanity" (9), in a world that is "inescapably multicultural and multinational" (8). She argues that the citizen who cultivates her humanity sees "human beings bound to all other human beings by ties of recognition and concern" (10). Among the abilities this citizen needs is what Nussbaum refers to as the "narrative imagination" (10), the ability to see the world through the experiences and perspectives of individuals different from oneself (10-11). The arts and, in particular, literature, especially those works that "unsettle and disturb" (100), "cultivat[e] powers of imagination that are essential to citizenship" (85).

Thus, I want to suggest that multiethnic literature's value to social change lies in its imaginative capacities. Inspired change in the public sphere is simply not possible without fostering creativity in our students, and attending to the creativity in literature is one way to accomplish this objective. We can and must make literature relevant without denying its distinctiveness. Imagination, the ability to envision a better world, is key to social progress, and it is what distinguishes, but does not privilege, literature from other forms of discourse.

But how does literature cultivate the powers of the imagination, thus making social change possible, even if not immediate? As I confront this most vexing issue, I examine and critique two seemingly rival strands within the discipline: the notion that multiethnic literary pedagogies are insufficiently political and the claim that the reading and teaching of multiethnic literature has become merely instrumental. Next, I draw upon the aesthetic theories of Satya Mohanty and Murray Krieger to argue that multiethnic literature can serve both aesthetics and left politics. (2) I then suggest strategies to integrate the aesthetic and the political in the multiethnic literature classroom.

Beyond the Politicized Text: Is the Text Enough?

For many critical theorists today, literature is viewed with "suspicion" (Bell 487), and aesthetics is equated with the status quo and efforts to dominate and oppress others. From this perspective, by passing on to generations of students Western virtues and ideas through the study of the Great Books, literary studies reinscribes hegemonic knowledge and social injustices. From its inception, multicultural studies interrogated and challenged the traditional canon, both in terms of the texts included and criteria for inclusion. Traditional aesthetic standards were rightfully perceived as socially constructed by dominant power groups, and it became clear that works of literature not fitting these standards were excluded and marginalized and that works by women and minorities would never be given a fair hearing. It thus made sense to eschew traditional criteria of literariness to allow for new voices and texts to be valued in scholarship and classrooms and, at the same time, to immerse students in the inevitably politicized nature of reading texts by writers from marginalized ethnic cultures.

While multiculturalist, poststructuralist, feminist, postcolonialist, and other theorists have underscored the political nature of literature and literary studies and the cultural work of reading and teaching literature, some scholar-teachers question the literary text's and the literature classroom's political effectiveness. For some of these scholars, even multiethnic literary studies is insufficiently political in that it leaves students and faculty insulated in the academy and does not accomplish real-world or pragmatic change. Current pedagogies, they argue, do not go far enough in engaging students in social reform. Others suggest that the inaccessibility of literary theory furthers the gap between academics, literature, and the public (see Graft; Davis and Mirabella).

Ellen Cushman's work is among the most explicit calls to revision literary studies' focus beyond textuality. Cushman argues that literary scholars produce scholarship to advance their "narrow specializations" without any attempt to "make this knowledge relevant, accessible, or responsive to public concerns" (209). Even multicultural and cultural studies, which have broadened considerations of what constitutes a text and what texts are worthy of study, have merely reinforced "the core values of consuming texts, maintaining a disinterested critical stance, and the interpretation of a select, though more inclusive, set of authors" (209). Thus, she argues, multiculturalism has sacrificed its intellectual and political agency either by reinscribing traditional forms of knowledge making or by making new forms of knowledge inaccessible to all but the most specialized group of fellow scholars, "remov[ing] them from the daily political issues and social classes they claim to represent" (209).

Cushman argues that Gerald Graft's widely respected "Teach the Conflicts" model has made great strides in revising English studies by shifting the focus from the text to "academic interaction around the text" (210). (3) However, the "Teach the Conflicts" model, too, privileges academic discourses and knowledge-making over politics, issues, and debates important to students and nonacademic communities (210). For Cushman, the solution is to link literature with students' and community residents' daily lives through service learning and other outreach initiatives because literature "artfully illustrates and exemplifies life's complexity, a nuance of action, and/or a subtlety of perception" (210). Cushman argues that community members, students, and faculty can use their varied interpretations of literature to identify local conflicts and work toward social change (211). (4) Linking service learning with literature reinvents literary and literacy studies in the direction of shared, collaborative knowledge-making and problem-solving.

I find Cushman's vision for English studies interesting, especially since I often incorporate service learning into my multiethnic and women's literature courses. Yet I am concerned that Cushman's vision of service learning and literature assumes a connection between the aesthetic and the political without theorizing this link. That is, how might literature's artistic characteristics further service learning's potentially transformative work?

Likewise, while my admiration for Henry Giroux's passionate concern for justice is deep, I am concerned that Giroux's critique of textuality ignores crucial questions of imaginative literature's creative potential to stimulate new visions and creative solutions that he says are necessary for social justice. Giroux argues that multiculturalism must extend beyond textual analysis to address power issues in the public realm and to solve public problems (64). In particular, multicultural literary theorists must overcome their narrow focus on "texts" and "signs" (68), which leads to little more than an "affirmation of indeterminacy as a transgressive aesthetic" (69). It is insufficient to consider the politics of texts, the canon, or the curriculum without connecting those issues to power in more public spheres (75-76). By moving away from the text, Giroux argues, theorists will become more "politically responsible" in their approaches to literary texts and, in so doing, will "open ... up possibilities for new approaches to social reform" (68), addressing issues such as civil rights for minorities and the poor, including immigrants; public school reform; racism in the criminal justice system; and welfare and workfare.

Yet how will such new possibilities derive from "politically responsible" theory related to literary texts? Giroux uses as his example the film 187, an extreme version of the film genre that portrays poor, urban, minority youth as violent and uncontrollable (77). Giroux's analysis of this film beyond what the text itself "might mean" to how it both reflects and contributes to the conditions that allowed it to be made is compelling (83). Guiding students beyond the film to issues of affirmative action, public school reform, police brutality against minorities and the poor, bilingual education, and so forth seems to me to be incredibly useful. But I question whether in so doing, Giroux loses sight of what art might contribute to narrative imagination. In other words, if we teach a literary text as Giroux would have us teach a film like 187, do we lose sight of the fact that we are teaching literary art?

(Re)Emerging Aesthetics: Returning to the Text as Art

At the same time that some scholars are calling for moving beyond the literary text, others are calling for valuing literature as art. Many of these scholars also critique contemporary literary theory, but from another vantage point. Kurt Spellmeyer argues that the elitism attributed to proponents of the Great Books is not much different from the elitism of the current emphasis on theory. Theory has turned the scholar into a "celebrity," is used as a means to "preserv[e] our profession's prestige," and, subsequently, reinforces and perpetuates exclusion and disempowerment (897). No one benefits from our work as much as each of us.

But rather than turn to the more explicitly political, Spellmeyer argues for a "paradigm shift" away from the "signs" and the "text" and a return to "the arts imagined as traditions of experience that intensify our sense of living in and with the world" (894). Art "tak[es] us beyond ourselves and back into the world" (911). Through experiencing art, we may potentially perceive the constructions that blind us to the world as it is or should be and eradicate the "violence at the heart of our society, where the powerlessness of the many sustains the power of the few" (911). Thus English studies practitioners will have to become "ethnographers of experience" who "find out how people actually feel" (italics in original, 911).

Like Spellmeyer, I care about how literature makes readers feel, for l have often experienced tremendous joy, pain, and many other emotions through reading literature. Moreover, I believe Spellmeyer's call to regain the self (and to regain pleasure) through the reading of literature is significant, especially when reading literature by writers from backgrounds different from one's own; it is useful to learn about others, but it is also important to continue to learn about the self. Multiethnic literature, in particular, may lead a reader to question her values and beliefs. Yet I am not convinced that Spellmeyer provides a means to appreciate the aesthetic while serving the political. His vision of a less violent world is one I share; however, I do not believe he has articulated, except at an intuitive level, how literature might get us there.

Mediating Aesthetics and Politics: Literature and the Possibilities for Social Action

By combining elements from Murray Krieger's and Satya Mohanty's aesthetic theories, I will theorize a crucial role for multiethnic aesthetics in the service of left politics. Specifically, I will argue that Krieger provides an understanding of the creative and thus social possibilities of literary art, while Mohanty directly addresses multiethnic literature's capacity to influence anti-racist, anti-sexist, and other progressive politics. Together, these theories shape a unique role for multiethnic aesthetics to contribute to social change.

In "My Travels with the Aesthetic," Krieger continues his long time defense of the aesthetic. He denies that aesthetic appreciation need be hedonistic, leisure-class, or escapist (208). Unlike other discourse, literary discourse--the aesthetic--calls attention to its fictional claims and, in so doing, does not trap its readers in its art or ideologies: "it is in the play of fictional illusion that we can indulge the freedom of the aesthetic" (226). From this perspective, literature can refer both inward to itself and outward to the world, resisting the organicism of formalist criticism. (5)

Acknowledging ideology's constraints on discourse, Krieger claims that "the creative power that asserts itself in the complex struggle to make a literary text" is unique to literary art (229). Through the struggle between the writer, her art, her experience, and her world, the text resists being "history's receptacle"; it "free[s] itself to be the source of further history" (229). The artist is culturally constituted, but his vision is not limited to what he or his society already knows. The literary text, through its aesthetic power, can defy and determine history.

Yet Krieger denies that the literary text will necessarily contribute to progressive politics. He allows for the literary to serve left politics, but he views it as equally able to serve any politics (see also Levine). Citing Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, dialogical function of the novel, Krieger argues that the aesthetic "undermines ideological commitment" (227); the aesthetic may act as a liberating force, but it is just as likely to open up the text to multiple ideologies that are equally compelling, or at least claim to be (224). Literary art, unlike other forms of discourse, eschews any totalizing ideology, right or left.

In contrast, Mohanty's arguments in "Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics" provide theoretical support that literary art, and the multiethnic aesthetic, in particular, will more than likely serve left politics. Mohanty's arguments hinge on his assertion, with which I agree, that "our deepest aesthetic notions" are objective (820). Building on his earlier work, which rejects extreme constructivism and reconceives positivist objectivity from a social perspective, Mohanty claims that the aesthetic is both naturalist (based in human nature) and "'perfectly compatible" with individual differences and ideological shapings (820). Our aesthetic responses are not deterministic (822); rather, "what gives an object ... aesthetic value is that it provides deep and abiding satisfaction (rather than simply pleasure) to [humans], given our needs as humans" (822). Mohanty does not equate objectivity with neutrality; aesthetics are not detached from society nor do they transcend it. In other words, the naturalist view he proposes explains "the range of options that are typically available to us" as human beings who are mediated through our cultural and social worlds (824). Because aesthetics are easily manipulated through/by ideology, we must understand these processes in order to "propose powerful alternatives" to the dominant ideologies in literature that we expose as unjust (824).

Most significantly for my purposes, Mohanty claims that how we as human beings cross-culturally define aesthetics and beauty is deeply influenced by ideological and other considerations, but these conceptions can be "revised and extended" in positive, progressive ways (825, nay emphasis). Mohanty's realist view of values, including aesthetics, suggests that as human beings, we use knowledge and error to move toward realizing individual human worth and dignity, which are neither culture-dependent nor socially constructed (818). (6) Epistemic inquiry and error lead to more progressive values in ethics, politics, and aesthetics. In repressive societies, aesthetic practice and inquiry have been limited to dominant groups, yet "real aesthetic discovery has been possible," Mohanty argues, "when new social relations become imaginable" (825). When we study aesthetics and come to see how it is manipulated by ideology, often leading to injustices and other kinds of pernicious prejudices, we are driven to "revision and improvement" (828); that reexamination should take place cross-culturally, broadening the knowledge-field, allowing for new, unfamiliar, and diverse perspectives into the mix (829). That is, artistic vision allows for beyond what is currently known but rather imagined.

By bringing together the perspectives of Mohanty and Krieger, we can envision a crucial role for both aesthetics and politics in multiethnic literature and pedagogy. Moreover, such analytical work responds to Cornel Bonca's assertion that Toni Morrison's Beloved is a work of awesome creativity and aesthetic power, "even if we have no legitimate paradigms for what makes it beautiful" (39, my emphasis). I suggest that the multiethnic text comprises a transformative space through which diverse aesthetic and cultural forms intersect and cross-pollinate and that this space becomes a way to expand readers' literary and aesthetic sensibilities beyond what they already know. It is through the creative power of this space that new possibilities for aesthetics arise and bring readers to consider objectivity in aesthetics and ethics in the pursuit of political ideals of acknowledging human worth and dignity. In this way, the aesthetics of the multiethnic literary text serves left politics.

Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying will serve as my brief example. Set in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying tells the story of Jefferson, a young black male sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. The inhumane, racist belief system in the South is revealed as morally reprehensible, manifested most starkly in a criminal justice system that executes a young black man without cause. The novel's aesthetic power emerges from "the subliminal ideological pushes and pulls within a cultural moment" which "undo the very mind-set (as well as language-set) that is victimized by ideology" (Krieger 230). I contend, however, that in this creative play, which expands and revises aesthetic criteria, some ideologies reveal themselves as more detrimental to humankind and justice than others; this creative play thus serves progressive politics.

A Lesson Before Dying negotiates several cultural and artistic forms and materials, creating a transformative aesthetic space that expands both literary and political sensibilities. The text's multiply inflected aesthetic vision incorporates modernist literary devices of first-person narration, complex characterization, and formal experimentation with African and African American cultural and aesthetic forms. Gaines recognizes the power and significance of the Great Books, but supplements them with folktales, local histories, blues expression, and African American sports icons Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. Most important, Gaines contrasts the attorney's "educated," dogmatic language to describe Jefferson (for example, he appeals to "scientific" beliefs about African Americans by asking the jury to "Look at the shape of this skull, this face as flat as the palm of my hand--look deeply into those eyes" [7]) with Jefferson's illiteracy. Jefferson's voice in his written diary--"good by mr wigin tell them im strong tell them im a man good by mr wigin im gon ax paul if he can bring you this" (234)--is as beautiful and moving as the most elevated, artful language of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott, to whom the attorney refers in making his case that Jefferson is not worth executing (8). By associating the deprivileged art with Jefferson's humanity, Gaines leads readers to reexamine their previous understandings of the aesthetic, not necessarily to reject these notions but to critique and re-shape them and allow for additional possibilities. In this way, the artistic vision of A Lesson Before Dying expands aesthetic and political possibilities.

Pedagogical Strategies: Mediating Aesthetics and Politics in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom

According to Mohanty, there are "moments in the history of a culture when the traditionally accepted ideas about what constitutes beauty in a given domain are challenged in a principled and sustained way" (829). This is one of those moments, and it behooves us to bring this principled challenge into our classrooms through cross-cultural inquiry. "[W]iden[ing]" the "experimental field" of knowledge increases the likelihood of realizing aesthetic, ethical, and political ideals (829). Toward that end, I offer the following classroom strategies to integrate the aesthetic and political in the study of multiethnic literature.

Among the most important strategies is to teach and foreground the multiple artistic and cultural forms in a multiethnic text. For example, for many students, Toni Morrison's haunting and disturbing The Bluest Eye is not literary: it simply does not accord with their prior conceptions of art or literature. When I teach this text, rather than strive for "coverage," I narrow the focus in order to bring in a range of aesthetic and ideological perspectives. I select among many of the text's central issues, such as female physical beauty, identity development, the individual and the community, racism, classism, and so forth, and through supplemental assigned readings (literary and nonliterary), the class approaches this topic from several angles.

In The Bluest Eye, African American children face an endless barrage of social messages about their physical beauty, from the white dolls they are supposed to adore to Shirley Temple images on cups to Mary Jane candies. Young Pecola Breedlove descends into madness, convinced she has the beautiful blue eyes she has long desired and that will make her loved by the communities--black and white--that have rejected her worth as a human being. Students acknowledge that beauty standards in American culture create a small percentage of individuals they would classify as beautiful; at the same time, however, they have a difficult time understanding the depth of Pecola's self-hatred and question Morrison for writing an entire novel about it.

By connecting The Bluest Eye with other texts dealing with racialized identities and female beauty, I hope to expand students' understanding of both aesthetic and political sensibilities by having them engage--with one another, Morrison, and the other writers--in conversations about physical and artistic beauty. The supplemental readings might include Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Story of My Body," in which a Puerto Rican girl struggles with beauty issues as she travels between Puerto Rico and New Jersey; Joy Mirikitani's short poem, "Recipe," a set of instructions for altering Asian facial features to meet "white" or mainstream beauty standards and the pain--physical and emotional--associated with this process; and Erin Aubry's "The Butt: Its Politics, Its Profanity, Its Power," a personal narrative of one African American woman's journey to accept and take pride in her "big butt," "a white-created pejorative of a black image" which black people have "made ... worse" (26). Aubry subverts these negative stereotypes when, in her parting words, she states, "So what if America, in its infinite generosity, wants to help me get rid of this bothersome behind ... I don't have an issue, I have a groove thing. Kiss my you know what" (31).

Reexamining The Bluest Eye from these perspectives, students may deepen their understandings of the socially constructed nature of female beauty and its profound impact on an individual and culture's sense of worth. Equally important, their work with these and other texts may assist them in extending their aesthetic definitions beyond the familiar, so that the scene in which Claudia destroys the white dolls becomes less frightening and can be viewed as an important component of Morrison's aesthetic and ideologies: "I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me" (20). Like Claudia, students of The Bluest Eye seem compelled to "discover the dearness" in the unfamiliar. I encourage them to analyze this scene and its language from new aesthetic perspectives, including Claudia's description of the Raggedy Ann dolls' "round moronic eyes" (20) or the "unyielding limbs" (20) and "bone-cold head" (20) of the "big, blue-eyed Baby Doll" (19).

I also think it is important to focus on the distinction between imaginative literature and "real life," which is particularly challenging for students when reading texts by writers from unfamiliar cultures. As many teachers of multiethnic literature have noted, students often read these texts as a search for "facts" about cultures different from their own, leading them to base their entire understanding of an ethnic, cultural, or racial group on a single imaginative text. This issue is further complicated by the ideological underpinnings of many of these texts--which often tend to be antiracist, anti-sexist, and so forth--and when the instructor assigns non-literary texts in the course. It becomes difficult for students to understand that, as Elizabeth Richmond-Garza suggests, "[l]iterary texts supplement the real rather than claim to represent it" (508); they "rarely provide an accurate, literal image of the world" (508). I have found Krieger's attention to literature's illusionary aspects to be a useful pedagogical strategy. In particular, I work with Krieger's assertion that "the aesthetic takes back the "reality" it offers us in the very act of offering it to us" (225). How does an imaginative text call attention to its fiction, and why? Do some texts try to "trick" the reader into believing they are real and, if so, why? My students have pointed to Judith Ortiz Cofer's explicit expressions about the relationship between memory and imagination in Silent Dancing. A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. They also point to the work's repetitive structure which, for some students, resembles the "real" way memories are recovered and told while, for others, illustrates Cofer's fictions as she changes the details with each telling. Students find this exercise especially challenging for A Lesson Before Dying because its ideological claims are so strong. But they are able to discern Krieger's meaning in Grant's first-person narration; some students argue that Grant is trustworthy because he narrates his experiences and observations, but others claim that Grant gives us clues that he is often not seeing things clearly. Students also spend a great deal of time working with this text's first sentence, "I was not there, yet I was there" (3), and debating why as readers we are never explicitly told whether Jefferson is innocent or guilty of the crime for which he is executed.

I turn these questions around, addressing Nussbaum's assertion that literature provides "an expansion of sympathies that real life cannot cultivate sufficiently" and "can transport us, while remaining ourselves, into the life of another, revealing similarities but also profound differences between the life and thought of that other and myself and making them comprehensible, or at least more nearly comprehensible" (111). In other words, I ask students to consider Nussbaum's (and others') claims that multiethnic literature teaches students about other cultures and perspectives they might never have encountered. I think many students do believe they learn about other cultures through literary texts (they think this is the primary reason for being in the course and, indeed, it does fulfill the university's "diversity" requirement), but I try to bring them into the "how." That is, if literature is illusionary and not real, how does it provide practical and cognitive knowledge? Again, I turn to Krieger's point that a literary text imagines possibilities beyond the real, beyond what the author, readers, and society already know. My students often claim that the visions in multiethnic texts are "not realistic," such as a less materialistic world in which individuals are not afraid of one another in unfamiliar neighborhoods because of their race, as in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street. They often read a work like A Lesson Before Dying as behind the times rather than visionary because students perceive that the racism about which Gaines writes is "much better today."

As instructors, we can probe these familiar ways of knowing; Gaines may be writing only to teach us about our racist past, and his art may do just that. But it may also "surprise" all of us, as Krieger suggests of literature's possibilities, and write history's future (229). My students enjoy it when I press them to think beyond what the text seems to suggest to what it might envision. Students have mentioned Gaines's vision of a criminal justice system that works equally for the rich and poor, white and nonwhite (they have interesting debates about the Kobe Bryant sexual assault charge); they have also spoken about Gaines's references to the black man's burden and the vision that the "vicious circle" will "ever be broken" (167). After reading Gloria Anzaldua's "La conciencia de la mestiza," students have speculated about whether Gaines is also imagining a mixed race people who use their new identities to create just conditions for everyone.

Another way I have approached the issue of literary imagination and "real life" is through a class portfolio of current news articles addressing "multicultural issues." Each student writes and presents to the class an analysis of an article in relationship to the issues discussed in class. As I tell students, it may be possible that their selected article will contradict our class discussions. Our local newspaper recently ran an article about a first-year Latino student at nearby Kutztown University who was struggling in his efforts to negotiate successfully his "outsider status" on a mostly white campus, his longing to be back home in an environment which to others seemed undesirable but to him was very much home, and his desire to live up to his family's expectations that he get a college degree. My students compared and contrasted his experiences with some of the characters they met and issues they read about in A Lesson Before Dying, Silent Dancing, and The House on Mango Street. By keeping students focused on both the imaginative and the real, and how they intersect, I hope to illuminate the divergences and convergences of imaginative literature and real-world experiences.

I have combined service learning with my multiethnic literature courses as a way to elucidate the distinction between the aesthetic and the "real," and also to enrich both the reading of literature and students' understanding of social ills and oppressive conditions. When I first began this instructional approach, I was drawn to the "real-world" aspect of service learning. My view was that the service learning experiences could help restructure students' interpretive experiences to more closely reflect the course texts' multicultural and feminist perspectives. Ironically, however, what I found was that the texts and the activity of reading and interpreting imaginative literature began to lose their central place in the course because students were more "convinced by" their "real-life" service experiences. As a result, I have tried to consider the kinds of service placements that would work in conjunction with literary study, l have asked such questions as, why literature at all? Why not other kinds of texts? How might literary interpretations serve to resolve local conflicts? How narrowly-prescribed must these interpretations be to be pragmatically useful?

I have made substantial changes to my service-learning-in-literature projects to center the tension and productive possibilities between the imaginary and the real. For example, this past semester, my students read books with children in an impoverished inner city elementary school. They were responsible for choosing the books and for justifying their choices based on aesthetic and cultural concerns. Additionally, students wrote in their journals about art's relationship(s) to social change (many write about music), about their service work as "political," and about the relationships between literature and their service work.

Finally, I want to emphasize that literature courses that invite many and diverse perspectives can contribute to aesthetic inquiry and thus to ideological re-shapings that are indeed progressive. For this to occur, we must allow our students to experiment with their ideas as they test out familiar and unfamiliar ways of knowing. I am not advocating a class where students insult one another on the basis of race, sexual orientation, and so forth. However, I have taught multicultural content enough to know that when it is going well, when students are engaged in important discussions, comments may be made that may strike the instructor or other students as ignorant or even cruel. Dealing with these explosive moments is one of our greatest challenges as teachers of multiethnic literature.

Literary judgments are inevitable, and aesthetic judgments are never made in a vacuum, devoid of ideology or interest. But aesthetics need not be reduced to politics. I care deeply about social justice and am passionate about multiethnic imaginative literature and, while I still wrestle with the inescapable challenges, I believe I can share both passions with my students, If we deny the aesthetic to our students in the pursuit of the political, we deprive our students of what George Levine refers to as a "fundamental element of human experience" (909), an experience many of us were fortunate to have had during our own literary educations. How we as teachers and scholars of multiethnic literature choose to integrate the aesthetic and the political is what may determine how our students view their own relationships to both art and social change.

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. "La conciencia de la mestiza." Bordelands/La Frontera. 1980. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1991. 99-113.

Aubry, Erin J. "The Butt: Its Politics, its Profanity, Its Power." Adios, Barbie. Young Women Write about Body Image and Identity. Ed. Ophira Edut. Seattle: Seal P, 1998. 22-31.

Bell, David. "A Moratorium on Suspicion?" PMLA 117.3 (2002): 487-90.

Berube, Michael. The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies. New York: New York UP, 1998.

Bonca, Cornel "In the Big Muddy: Art and Politics in the Classroom." The Canon in the Classroom: The Pedagogical Implication of Canon Revision in American Literature. Ed. John Alberti. New York: Garland, 1995. 29-44.

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. Houston: Arte Publico, 1990.

--. "The Story of My Body." The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993. 135-46.

Cushman, Ellen. "Service Learning as the New English Studies." Beyond English Inc.: Curricular Reform in a Global Economy. Ed. David B. Downing, Claude Mark Hurlbert, and Paula Mathieu. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 204-18.

Davis, Lennard J., and M. Bella Mirabella. Introduction. Left Politics and the Literary Profession. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. 1-16.

Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying. 1993. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Giroux, Henry A. Impure Acts. The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars. How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Presidential Address 2002: 'Stay Illusion'--On Receiving Messages from the Dead." PMLA 118.3 (2003): 417-26.

Grobman, Laurie. "'Postpositivist Realism' in the Multicultural Writing Classroom: Beyond the Paralysis of Cultural Relativism." Pedagogy. Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, and Culture 3.2 (2003): 205-25.

Krieger, Murray. "My Travels with the Aesthetic." Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today. Ed. Michael P. Clark. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 208-36.

Levine, George. "Saving Disinterest: Aesthetics, Contingency, and Mixed Conditions." New Literary History 32.4 (2001): 907-31.

Mirikitani, Joy. "Recipe." Shedding Silence, Poetry and Prose. Berkeley CA: Celestial Arts, 1978.

Mohanty, Satya. "Can Our Values Be Objective? On Ethics, Aesthetics, and Progressive Politics." New Literary History 32.4 (2001): 803-33.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Penguin, 1988.

--. The Bluest Eve. 1969. New York: Washington Square, 1972.

North, Stephen. Refiguring the Ph.D. in English Studies: Writing, Doctoral Education, and the Fusion-Based Curriculum. Urbana IL: NCTE, 2000.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth M. "Concentrating on and in Literature." PMLA 117.3 (2002): 506-09.

Scholes, Robert E. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1998.

Spellmeyer, Kurt. "After Theory: From Textuality to Attunement with the World." College English 58.8 (1996): 893-913.

Yagelski, Robert P., and Scott A. Leonard. The Relevance of English: Teaching That Matters in Students' Lives. Urbana IL: NCTE, 2002.

Laurie Grobman

Penn State University, Berks-Lehigh Valley College

Notes

(1.) These concerns are part of larger disciplinary ambivalence, evident in the number of recent books that address literary studies' mission and status and, indeed, seek to re-envision the entire enterprise. Such scholars as Berube; North, et al.; and Scholes seek to understand English studies' problems (which they see somewhat differently) and redefine the discipline. They seem to share with Yagelski and Leonard an uncertainty about the "relevance" of English and literary studies (Yagelski and Leonard's 2002 collection is appropriately titled The Relevance of English: Teaching That Matters in Students' Lives). The 2002 PMLA featured a 34-page forum, "Why Major in Literature--What Do We Tell Our Students?" further testifying to the sense that literary specialists question the discipline's cultural capital. Despite their differences, these English studies specialists seem to agree with MLA President Stephen Greenblatt's sense that "we often seem in danger of losing sight of what we centrally do" (423).

(2.) In an article published in Pedagogy, I apply Mohanty's postpositivist realism to pedagogical practice in composition.

(3.) Graft's "Teach the Conflicts" approach brings students into the conflicts of literary studies, especially multiculturalism. In Beyond the Culture Wars, Graft calls for pedagogical approaches to literature that account for Western and non-Western cultures. "Teach the Conflicts" has since been expanded and extended by numerous scholar-teachers.

(4.) Few service learning and literature projects exist, but Cushman points to the Life Reading Project at Michigan State University as one example. In this program, students and community members in retirement and community centers interpret literature in small discussion groups (215).

(5.) That is, the literary text is not a self contained, self-referential object; it exists within the world, and the reader's response, the author's intentions, and the vast array of cultural contexts impact its meaning.

(6.) Nussbaum, too, argues that human worth is universal, stating, "it is always radical, in any society, to insist on the equal worth of all human beings, and people find all sorts of ways to avoid the claim of that ideal.... We should defend that radical agenda as the only one worthy of our conception of democracy and worthy of guiding its future" (112).