Here's something I found. William Washabaugh, whom I first encountered as a scholar of flamenco, writes an article "Philosophical Bases for Visual Multiculturalism at the College Level." For some reason not explained, visual literacy should focus on issues of race and gender: "visual studies can operate most effectively at the undergraduate level when combined with critical multiculturalism in a single mandatory general education course" (129).
Quoting Nussbaum, he find that courses in multiculturalism are ... to diverse, too different from one another. Lacking a common methodology. This might be a good thing (for me), but apparently it is not. Apparently, we must all think in the same way.
It turns out that this should center whiteness:
Within such a single multicultural course, the issue of ideology should be central. Accordingly such a course should provide ample opportunity for contemporary studies of whiteness. In place of wide-ranging celebratory descriptions of minority groups and their histories, studies of whiteness focus attention on the ideological forces that create ethnic groups, and on the gendering and racializing processes that reproduce privilege. (136; emphasis aded).
Well, this is a lot more efficient, because you don't have to know much about these minority groups, just that they are produced, negatively, by "ideological forces." Don't focus on celebrating anything these groups have achieved, on their own ways of constructing their reality. Treat everything from the perspective of the self-questioning white intellectual, by all means.
The idea that this would be a single, mandatory class is rather chilling. A unitary model for "multiculturalism."
3 comments:
He made Full with this vita which indicates UWMilwaukee is not all that demanding of a place. https://sites.uwm.edu/wash/cv/ I mean you can get away with those publishers here maybe but I know universities, not top ones either, where, etc.... So that's me being mean, my vita is worse, but the thing is that this one is one that made Full.
Anyway, a broad multicultural education is one thing, and what he's proposing is something else. It's a valid and important course, but if made into a universal requirement is unlikely except in the VERY best of circumstances to be anything but poorly given and resented, and it doesn't substitute for having a large variety of courses available that don't center US/Europe.
I am still burned since an advisee told me today that "regular" history was Europe and US and everything else was a niche interest. This advisee would be for a multicultural course IF all the cultures were US ones. But is not interested in foreign countries unless they are in W Europe minus Spain and Portugal. THAT kind of myopia is an important part of what multicultural requirements used to fight and evidently still need to.
Right. Multi-culturalism in US alone cannot even be multiculturalism, since the other cultures come from other places, reflect immigrant experiences. The international perspective is key, to see the US as part of the Americas in the plural, but also including Jewish and Chinese diasporas, relations of power between Latin American and the Iberian peninsula.
The whole book on visual literacy that I was excited to read was a bit of a dud, in that the visual itself seemed to play second fiddle to a theoretical discourse about it.
Interesting
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