Self as Post-Colonial Pastiche:
Historical Artifact and Multicultural Ideal

Eduardo Manuel Duarte
Hofstra University

The current leitmotif of multicultural discourse is hybridity. To speak today as a multiculturalist is to speak of culture as open-ended, permeable, and continuously (re)produced by cross-cultural encounters; a borderland topos where the lives of people from a multiplicity of backgrounds are constantly intersecting and crisscrossing and thereby producing "a polyvalent assemblage of new cultural meanings."^[1] To speak today as a multiculturalist is also to characterize the self as having a border identity, a mestizo consciousness formed out of the dialectics of difference. In sum, multiculturalism has embraced a Freirean philosophic anthropology which "affirms men and women as being in the process of becoming - as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality."^[2]

As Cornel West reminds us, analyzing multiculturalism from a contemporary philosophical perspective means situating oneself within hybrid culture and giving up on the "quest for pure traditions and pristine heritages."^[3] In turn, when philosophers of education have understood the implications of living in a "thoroughly hybrid culture" we will express a critically cautious attitude toward educational programs aimed at combatting what Molefi Kete Asante calls cultural dislocation.^[4] Such discretion is expressed by Kevin McDonough as he develops his cosmopolitanism against the potentially oppressive outcomes of ethnic studies multiculturalism.^[5] For McDonough, like West, criticism of ethnic studies multiculturalism is aimed at the notion of cultural identity that is (apparently) embedded within these programs. Against this view, which he says expresses a limited and static view of culture and a "predetermined ancestral identity," McDonough's cosmopolitanism identifies the cultural self as the product of cross-fertilzation, "a cultural context that is much more heterogeneous, open-ended and fragmented than something we can call 'our own' cultural structure." For McDonough the foundation of multicultural education is the hybrid nature of self, the multicultural nature of each individual's identity.

A central claim in McDonough's paper is that a cultural centricity approach to multicultural education is potentially oppressive (a form of cultural mis-recognition) in so far it imposes a predetermined cultural identity upon children. However, McDonough's critique of multicultural initiatives that "foist" homogenous group cultural identities "upon children" would also apply to those programs aimed at, in his words, "constructing" cosmopolitan identities "by trying to create cultural 'mongrels.'" In either case, the educator is committed to the imperative of socializing students toward a preferred type of cultural identity (which may or may not be consistent with and "recognize" the student's lifestyle choice). Of course, a probable response to my argument would suggest that a cosmopolitan identity is a preferential option for multicultural education because, as McDonough says, "children's identities are constituted by a complex mosaic of cultural fragments." Yet, even if we grant the hybridity thesis our commitment to this claim still begs the question: what happens when students have a strong association with their inherited ancestral culture? McDonough's critique of ethnic studies multiculturalism seems to hang on the presumption that "deep ambivalence" toward one's traditional culture is the rule. He thereby neglects to consider the fact that "minority" students (in specific opposition to their teachers) often seek to remain rooted or centered within an inherited linguistic, ethnic, and/or religious community. Indeed, as Deyhle (whom McDonough sites) and others have shown,^[6] these students often thumb their noses at the postmodern condition and choose to (re)locate themselves within a tradition where their cultural identity is more than "a variety of disparate cultural 'fragments'" loosely weaved together. What is more, these students often demand educational programs that will support their choice.

Historically speaking, it is precisely those (organized) oppositional movements by students which lead to the initial instutionalization of multicultural education in the form of ethnic studies.^[7] This point is not overlooked by Charles Taylor when he locates the multicultural politics of recognition within the counter-hegemonic strategies of post-colonial discourse. As Taylor suggests (in one of the few instances where he specifically discusses multicultural education)

the background premise of these demands [within muliticultural education] is that recognition forges identity, particularly in its Fanonist application: dominant groups tend to entrench their hegemony by inculcating an image of inferiority in the subjugated. The struggle for freedom and equality must therefore pass through a revision of these images. Multicultural curricula are meant to help in this process of revision.^[8]

Taylor's location of multicultural education within a Fanon-inspired critical pedagogy^[9] points to another questionable assumption that runs throughout McDonough's paper, namey, that hybridity is a phenomenological description of the self that ethnic studies advocates cannot subscribe to because "an education designed to ensure the survival of existing cultures cannot also respect the fundamentally multicultural nature of individual identity." However, McDonough's critique mistakenly assumes that the educational aim of centricity (rooting or "locating students within the context of their cultural references"^[10]) ignores the "complexity" (hybridity) of cultural identity. His critique becomes particularly problematic when we follow Taylor and situate the cultural recognition thesis within a post-colonial framework. Cultural survival from this perspective does not and cannot ignore the multicultural nature of the individual. On the contrary, the hybridity of the student's subjectivity represents the starting point for this critical multicultural perspective.^[11] Instead of demanding, as McDonough claims, that we recognize "some purified, untainted version of [an] ancestral culture," a post-colonial ethnic studies multiculturalism insists that we avoid romanticizing and idealizing the hybrid or mestizaje self, and compels us to recognize this subject-position as a historical outcome of the colonial expansion throughout the American continent which "trampled the culture and heritages of degraded, hated, haunted, despised African...and indigenous people's culture."^[12]

Thus, to suggest with McDonough that "children whose ancestral cultures are threatened by ways of life developed by outsiders may have trouble developing the preconditions for a cosmopolitan identity" is to ignore the historicity of the hybrid self and, perhaps, to abstract from the diasporic conditions that have produced mestizo subjectivity. Cultural hybridity, educators must remember, did not emerge through a cosmopolitan "dangerous fantasy," nor willed by individual artists who exercised an "unconfined imagination." To view cultural hybridity in this way is (perhaps) to echo the guile and privileged aloofness of Richard Rorty's postmodern bourgeois liberal and the sardonic irony of his neo-romantic strong poet .^[13]

McDonough's call to design education practices which demonstrate respect for the multicultural identities of children becomes compelling to educators if and when we understand that hybrid subjectivity is simultaneously an historical product of notorious cultural collisions and a philosophic ideal of self held out by critical educators who confront the living legacy of past colonial misadventures. As an unchosen product of history, the hybrid self is the artifact of cultural dislocation, disorientation, and misorientation. As an ideal of critical pedagogy, it represents the liberatory possibilities of the border identity which emerge in the educational practice of "deconstructing and taking control of narratives of the self while recognizing...the polylingualism in one's own language."^[14]

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[1] Peter McLaren,Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57. For discussions of culture as borderland and processural, see Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: the Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1993).

[2] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1994), 65.

[3] Cornel West, "Diverse New World," in Debating P.C., ed. Paul Berman (New York: Dell, 1992), 326-27.

[4] Molefi Kete Asante, "The Afrocentric Idea in Education," Journal of Negro Education 60, no. 2 (1991): 170-80.

[5] McDonough does not specifically name the category of multicultural education he is criticizing. I have placed it within the category of ethnic studies multicultural education. For a discussion of the various "types" of multicultural education see James Banks, "Multicultural Education: Historical Development, Dimensions and Practice," in Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, ed. James Banks and Cherry McGee-Banks (NewYork: MacMillan, 1995), 3-24.

[6] Donna Deyhle, "Navajo Youth and Anglo Racism: Cultural Integrity and Resistance," Harvard Educational Review 65, no. 3 (1995): 404-44; Antonia Darder, Culture and Power in the Classrom (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1991); John Ogbu, "Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities in Comparative Perspective," in Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities, ed. Margaret Gibson and John Ogbu (New York: Garland, 1991), 3-33.

[7] See, for example, Ramon Guitterez, "Ethnic Studies: Its Evolution in American Colleges and Universities," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Golderg (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 157-68.

[8] Charles Taylor, "Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 65-66.

[9] For a discussion of the relation between Frantz Fanon's "narratives of liberation" and critical pedagogy see Kenneth Mostern, "Decolonization as Learning: Practice and Pedagogy in Frantz Fanon's Revolutionary Narrative," in Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies, ed. Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren (New York: Routledge, 1994), 253-71.

[10] Asante, "The Afrocentric Idea in Education," 171.

[11] For an excellent discussion of "heterogeneity" as a foundational category in critical multiculturalism see David Theo Goldberg, "Introduction: Multicultural Conditions," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Golberg (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 20-43.

[12] West, "Diverse New World," 327.

[13] Richard Rorty,Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). For a critique of Rorty's position as expressing the "logic of apartheid" see Richard Bernstein, "Rorty's Liberal Utopia," Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 31-72.

[14] McLaren, Predatory Culture, 107.