Afterword: Some Notes on Radical Teaching

Abstract

The enemy of the state is not necessarily our enemy. The allies of the state are not necessarily our allies. One way to heal the wounds we sustain from living and teaching in a war culture is to build a peace culture in our profession and in our universities, starting with our classrooms. The whole weight of the war culture is working against us. So the bonds of scholars working together as “communal modernists” studying “communal modernisms” are fragile and we must work to keep them alive. This book is a brave effort to break the cultural canon and its need to isolate individual geniuses from their historical and political contexts, their cultures and their fellow artists. The literary canon is a product of the war culture and its maintenance supports the war culture. The world of men (and now women) in uniform with guns dominates everything we and our students do. Communal spaces once respected—schools and universities, public places where people gather—have become the sites of bombings and shootings. The war has invaded our communal home places as citizens. How do we insist on our right to safe, free spaces where we may gather to express ourselves, especially when that expression is often at odds, if not opposed, to the war culture’s dictates? One answer, for many dissenting people who do not wish to participate in the American occupation of other countries and its wars on their inhabitants, is to “Occupy” public spaces to assert free speech, to seek to protect our own human rights, and to demand that our country respect the rights of others.