Teaching the olitical with homi bhabha

As I have suggested throughout this book, the relationship among culture, politics, and pedagogy is the subject of heated debate for social theorists, political pundits, and educators, and the controversy cuts across ideological lines. Much of the animus is unsurprisingthe detritus of the conservative recoil from difference-though it has taken on a new urgency as part of the broader backlash against women, minorities of color, youth, and the welfare state itself. The more familiar lines of attack can be summarized as follows: cultural politics is repudiated in the interests of a new-actually old-orthodoxy of anachronistic materialism, or it is simply dismissed as a corrupting influence on the universal values of truth, beauty, and reason. Caught between the modalities of a timeless universal aesthetic or a narrowly defined economism, factions on both the right and left mark culture’s proliferation of differences as profoundly dangerous. Removing culture from the play of power and politics, educators and critics across the political spectrum thwart the possi-bility for understanding how learning is linked to social change. Moreover, such an erasure mystifies how the struggle over identities, meanings, values, and desires that takes place across the whole field of social practices is wielded to make it difficult for subaltern groups to participate in such struggles in ways that carry any legitimacy Yet some of the criticism provides a welcome opportunity for rethinking the relationship between cultural politics and politics in general, between cultural politics and the politics of literacy, and between pedagogy and agency In what follows, we will continue an important theme of this book-defending culture as an important site of political struggle, and pedagogy as a crucial component of cultural politics. In doing so, we want to first analyze some recent public conversations about university educators in general and the nature of pedagogy in particular. Increasingly, pedagogy has either been dismissed as an unviable element of education and cultural politics or rendered politically obsolete by reducing it to a method and set of instrumental prescriptions and teaching tips. We spend some time on these examples, because they are characteristic of how pedagogy is being depoliticized as part of a broader attack on higher education and the culture of politics itself. In opposition to these attacks, we attempt to make a case for the relationship between the politics of culture and the culture of politics-and for the primacy of the pedagogical as a constitutive force in the resuscitation of a democratically informed political culture that links the struggle over identities and meaning to the wider struggle over material relations of power.1 In doing so, we turn to the work of Homi Bhabha as an example of critical pedagogical practice concerned with the relationships among culture, power, and politics, on one hand, and literacy, pedagogy, and social change on the other. Bhabha’s work is important for rethinking pedagogy as a mode of cultural inquiry that is essential for questioning the conditions under which knowledge and identifications are produced and subject positions are taken up or refused. Bhabha also raises important questions regarding how we think about politics-that is, how we understand the dynamics of culture within the shifting terrain of the discursive-and the implications it has for theorizing the pedagogical conditions that make social agency possible.