Multicultural Mapping

Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, eds.
Mapping Multiculturalism
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996

In the three and a half decades since the civil rights movement began, voices from the margins of the United States have begun to re-map dramatically what it means to be American. Women, gays, lesbians, and people of color—those "ex-centrics" traditionally pushed to the social, cultural, and political periphery—have thrown Western ideological forces of control into high relief, substantially changing the way we see the world: Subtle mechanisms of ideological control have been and continue to be exposed, and "universals" now come with question marks.

Today, the fight for the right to diversify our knowledge base continues, this time under the aegis of "multiculturalism." Hand in hand with political movements such as women's lib and the Young Lords Party, the Ethnic and Women's Studies departments that have sprouted up across the nation have forced intellectuals to come down from the isolated heights of Eurocentric white male viewpoints typical of fields such as history, literature, sociology, and psychology. People in and out of the academy have come to realize they must actively diversify and complicate their interpretations and representations of our reality. In daily life, managers in Nissan and Toyota factories that employ high numbers of people of color attend special "cultural diplomacy" training sessions; increased production of "ethnic" films and books now offer alternatives to traditional Leave It to Beaver or Gone With the Wind representations of the American experience. In the academy, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) has theorized an ecriture engagée unique to women authors; Chicano scholars have celebrated a new literary and cultural canon with publications such as Aztlán: Essays from the Chicano Homeland (ed. Rudolfo Anaya & Francisco Lomeli, 1989) and Ramon Saldívar's Chicano Narrative (1990); and influential postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Spivak have opened eyes to the imperial mechanisms that continue to silence the Third World subaltern. Not to mention that today universities nationwide require undergraduates to take Western Civilization courses that have been reworked to examine histories, cultures, and narratives from a non-white-male point of view.

We have certainly come a long way since the early sixties, but there is still more work to be done, especially in the face of current backlash trends: anti-immigration laws and an anti-affirmative action proposition have recently passed with a landslide in California, and the racially essentialist Bell Curve and Western Canon have made the best-seller list. Moreover, multiculturalism sans the acknowledgment of each marginalized group's special social-historical circumstances can lead to ethnic tokenization—once an English department, say, has one Chicano professor and couple of Chicano students, its administrative guilt has been assuaged, while Asian or African Americans are ignored. And without support from high up, an occasional class on the Harlem Renaissance can be little more than the flavor of an offbeat month.

In this environment marked by conservative swings and the forces of international capitalism, editors Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon have assembled a collection of responses to the resistance multiculturalism has met, as well as to its successes. Their book, Mapping Multiculturalism (1996), offers a diverse range of critics—sociologists, literary and cultural theorists, filmmakers, and more—who question the role of our "new" awareness of alternative discourses and worldviews. The essays in this book, all culled from a conference entitled "Translating Cultures: The Future of Multiculturalism," examine the meaning of the word multiculturalism. Some do so by openly embracing current multiculturalist moves to educate society, others by exposing multiculturalism as little more than a strategy picked up by corporate America as it goes for a United-Colors-of-Benetton-style whitewashing of the political, social, and historical conditions that have shaped each of North America's marginalized communities.

The U.S. has had its own history of internal colonialism—our education system, as one might suspect, has not been entirely free of hegemonizing practices. In her essay "Academic Apartheid" Annette Jaimes Guerrero takes us back to 1819 when the government established the so-called Civilization Fund—an educational administration whose goals were not to impart knowledge so much as to force Native American children to assimilate to white culture. At the Fund's schools, children were punished for speaking anything but English, and they learned European vocational skills, the "mechanical arts" (52). Under the later boarding school system, children were kidnapped and essentially incarcerated for the "betterment" of their tribes. And as Guerrero demonstrates, residuals of such racist educational practices continue to rear their ugly heads today, even in American Indian Studies programs; some such programs continue to be administered and manipulated by Euro-Americans, who set up curricula that reproduce and legitimate damaging racial stereotypes. For Guerrero, the white establishment's triumphant "multiculturalist" clarion call is little more than a smokescreen that distracts and detracts from the real political and social issues at hand. Multiculturalism is today's coercive strategy to "encourage assimilation" (56).

Literary critic Norma Alarcón focuses on the mixed-blood Third World woman as a site for resisting the dominant paradigm in her essay, "Conjugating Subjects." At the social and economic outer edges—oppressed because of phenotype, gender, and class—the mestiza becomes the ultimate site for contestation of the status quo. To survive, the mestiza slips and slides through different modes of existence, all while exposing the Euro-American mainstream's strategies to contain the ethnic subject. The mestiza, Alarcón writes, "constructs provisional identities...which subsume a network of signifying practices and structural experiences imbricated in the historical and imaginary shifting national borders of Mexico and the United States for Chicanas" (137). For Alarcón, the mestiza inhabits, along with other Third World women, a cultural, racial, and gendered interzone that not only allows the subject to question but also offers up alternative modi vivendi to those tossed out by the assimilative mainstream.

Wahneema Lubiano complicates the multicultural picture, focusing on the middle-class "ethnic" academic. Lubiano aims to diversify images of the "ethnic" critic by openly embracing her own middle-class academic status. She writes, "[o]ur political imaginary always focuses on the non-middle-class person of color, and this focus is part of the reason why I want to highlight the university and the role of the activist intellectual there" (66). For Lubiano, the middle-class academic of color is not a de facto sell out. If academics of color embrace what she terms a "radical multiculturalism," they can use their power to effect social and political change. The radical multiculturalist, she claims, "can influence decisions on whether to reconsider not only lopsided hiring practices at all employment levels in the university, but also the means by which the marginalized are represented in the policy-making entities of the university" (70). And Lubiano does not stop with the university. As a radical multiculturalist she intends to achieve the superhuman: to lean on the government and force it to spend its DOD dollars to fund research on more socially inclined projects, like low-income housing and aid for the homeless.

The collection wraps up with a couple of essays on popular culture. Here George Lipsitz and Tricia Rose extend the multiculturalist project into the domains of music, fashion, and dance, using their discussions of popular entertainment to dissolve the perceptual boundaries between what an intellectual and a guy on the street can achieve in terms of resistance. Indeed, they point out that, ironic as it may seem, one of the side-effects of capitalism is the opening up of channels of access to power. National and cultural borders that traditionally segregate marginal communities collapse when power is widely accessible. For example, in her essay "A Style Nobody Can Deal With" Tricia Rose examines how hip-hop culture—rap, breakdancing, and graffiti—was a response to the closed-door policy experienced by Puerto Rican, Afro-Caribbean, and black Americans in our inner-city education and employment sectors. Rather than read inner-city youth as victims of the system, however, Rose discusses the creative techniques (the use of dubbing decks, boomboxes, and graffiti paint) such youth use to re-territorialize their environment. On one occasion, Rose reads hip-hop haute couture style as more than simple consumption of desirable goods: "'fake' Gucci and other designer emblems...are cut up and patch-stitched to jackets, pants, hats, wallets, and sneakers [and] work as a form of sartorial warfare (especially when 'fake' Gucci-covered b-boys and b-girls brush past Fifth Avenue ladies adorned by the 'real' thing)" (435-436). She interprets pastiching and self-conscious posturing as a kind of postmodern parody and critique of the way the white middle class find self worth in commodity ownership.

Although this highlighting of the essays collected in Mapping Multiculturalism is by no means exhaustive, it captures the anthology's general tenet: to map out the multi-ethnic subject's resistance to, and the breakdown of, the white middle-class monolith. It is worth mentioning that not all of the essayists take an academic slant. For example, there is filmmaker Renee Tajima's personalized photo-journal of her journey through Asian America, which refreshes after a long run of polysyllabic, Latinate-infused articles.

Unfortunately, the volume as a whole overwhelms not just with jargon and a rhetorical fervor that obfuscates, but in the authors' failure to move beyond age-old racially essentialist arguments; the critics slip into overly facile analogs—white is bad, static, and oppressive, while the ethnic Other is good, dynamic, and liberating. This is ultimately damaging even to the multicultural project. For example, Alarcón's mestiza smacks of too much theorizing and too little reality checking; how, I ask, do the mestizas who live on a Tijuana/U.S. borderland transcend poverty and a border guarded by US-issue Dodge Ramchargers and panoptic surveillance towers? And there is little in the collection that offers pragmatic models for the reader to engage in multicultural mappings. Jon Cruz, for example, fails to inform us, as he promises to do, how the multicultural critic can "see to it that the fetishization of identities and the reification of differences do not take hold in ways that deny us in our differences the mutually enhancing changes to reconfigure the crisis-ridden social contract" (37).

All that said, the voices that make up Mapping Multiculturalism should nonetheless be heard. Perhaps the next step, however, is to shade in more of the grays between the whites and blacks, charting in finer detail the contours that make up a heterogeneous U.S. cultural landscape.

Fredrick Luis Aldama