Third world film: the particular and the global

Radical Teacher, Winter, 2001 by Linda Dittmar

One does not have to be a social studies teacher or an economist to bring global concerns into the classroom. Though the mere mention of "globalism" brings to mind thoughts of the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, Free Trade zones, environmental pollution, sweatshops, border-crossings, and media images of violent demonstrators rendered photogenic through fumes of tear gas, the global organization of finance, trade, and labor affects our work as educators much more broadly. The textbooks, supplies, and technologies we use, and the non-instructional labor which eases our work (notably non-unionized and largely immigrant), all participate in global economics, as does the current push towards online teaching and the proliferation of extension colleges and institutes overseas. More obliquely, even when our materials seem quite neutral in this regard--a poem by Wordsworth, for example, or a film comedy--our teaching participates in global cultural flows. Bringing to light the role of the imagination in social life, it shapes attitudes that sustain or question material global developments. While such creeping globalization is true of all areas of instruction, including the supposedly impractical humanities, this essay concerns more narrowly the kind of knowledge humanities courses produce, and their role within the global flow of capital and political spheres of influence. When we teach courses in English, History, Art History, Philosophy, Foreign Languages, Communications, and the like, both the material we select and the way we teach it reflect geopolitical assumptions, usually insular, usually Eurocentric. Though often unspoken and unexamined, the force of these assumptions is to extol our own culture, politics, and economy, and they shape most lecture notes and lesson plans across North America and Europe.

So, for example, the teaching of English literature at all levels usually concern British and U.S. (a.k.a "American") literatures. Except for a smattering of third world authors we hear little of Commonwealth and other anglophone literatures, and even less of post-colonial literatures in translation, let alone entire courses devoted to them. Indeed, the growing hegemony of English is, itself, a global concern, intertwined with financial global interests. In undergraduate education, art history flues even worse than its literary counterpart. Constrained by fewer course offerings and faculty lines, art departments feel hard pressed to devote space to issues in art history; connoisseurship, and exhibition from transcultural, non-western perspectives. Even history; which is more inclusive than the above, primarily focuses on Western history and not the histories of supposedly peripheral others. The reasons for this are familiar: there is no space in the curriculum, it's hard to find qualified teachers, and so on. These claims are true, if one sees the Euro-American tradition as the necessary core of good education. But the benign neglect that sustains them also argues that, ultimately, the culture, history, and ideology of whatever group is powerful enough to claim to speak for all humanity control much of the curriculum. If anything we treat this fact as axiomatic.

In the mid 1980s I had occasion to witness a particularly blatant enactment of a powerful group's staking out its claim to sole ownership of "legitimate" knowledge. The occasion was a faculty seminar on feminist theory hosted by Harvard University. The guest speaker was a Palestinian-American film maker and Ph.D. candidate who questioned the then-influential psychoanalytic approach to feminist film studies. Her point was that, for all the importance of psychoanalysis in unmasking films' patriarchal stance, seen globally, it suffers from cultural myopia. The Freudian and Lacanian models on which it was based, she suggested, are Eurocentric, patriarchal, heterosexual, middle class, white, and erroneously use the nuclear family as a universal model for human development. Still, though the speaker addressed her small all-female audience gently and in a supposedly friendly informal setting, and though she was doing so at a time when our schools, colleges, and textbook publishing were embracing all things "minority " and "diverse," her comments met a strikingly hostile reception. To this audience, the speaker's effort to open up a space for subaltern self-definition and a comparative perspective on difference across nations and continents seemed heretical. Even her choice of the word "trauma" to describe the collective experience of Palestinian dispossession was not granted. Instead, "trauma" was deftly reclaimed and re-privatized as an Oedipal scenario, without relation to her argument that this quintessentially Western perspective does not apply to her culture or indeed most world cultures.

Those attending the seminar may eventually have come to value the visitor's challenge to the universalizing Freudian model of human development as it affected feminist film scholarship during the eighties. Her argument for recognizing other cultures and other modes of social organization now fits in well with the more global perspective put forth by cultural and post-colonial studies. But the fact that this woman's audience could not assimilate this position at a time when awareness of racism, colonialism, imperialism, gender, and class relations had been growing world wide, illustrates my point that our reflexive, self preserving tendency is to sustain a self-serving myopia. Ultimately, at stake in that seminar room was a desire to affirm the Western model of social organization as the "natural" one globally. Ultimately, at stake for our students is often that same desire. As this incident suggests, there is little neutrality in our thinking, teaching, and learning. In this respect, the challenge for radical teachers is to strive to be aware of ways our work can so easily be lured into normalizing existing power relations as a global inevitability.