Culture

Glenn Close, Like a White Girl

preterite Culture, Music, Personal

I’m sure I’m not the only one from the DC area who had that thought watching the Oscars. I was delighted to see her shout-out to the city’s official music, and I wonder how many people who aren’t from DC recognize the genre or even remember the song.

The post’s title, of course, invokes another hit by E.U.: 1989’s “Shake It Like a White Girl,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to that era’s intersections of race, music, and dance in the nation’s capital, on the album that also had “Buck Wild” and a re-release of the collaboration with Salt-N-Pepa, “Shake Your Thang.”

Go-go’s syncopated swing has made other occasional forays into the musical mainstream. Prominent examples include Kurtis Blow, Morris Day and the Time (with “Skillet,” the addition of rock guitars by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis seemed inspired in that late 80s/early 90s moment, a la Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat” or Cypress Hill, but has not aged well), and even a couple of more recent hits by Beyoncé like “Green Light” and “Crazy in Love”: listen for go-go’s defining snare and bass drum dotted quarter-and-eighth rhythm during the verse.

None of those forays, to my mind, had the force and power of the 7-second snippet of Trouble Funk’s “Pump Me Up” that Hank Shocklee used as the intro to Public Enemy’s galvanizing “Fight the Power” from Do the Right Thing, a song still quickens my pulse every time I hear it. For those unfamiliar with the genre, “Godfather of Go-Go” Chuck Brown’s Go-Go Swing Live is likely the smoothest introduction, but the high-energy live recordings by Trouble Funk and Rare Essence, the latter with its absolutely scorching cover of the Bar-Kays’ “Holy Ghost” at 15:54, are more my speed.

And a few weeks before the Oscars aired, I was in DC with extraordinarily fortunate timing, in that I was able to catch the cherry blossoms in full bloom for the first time in decades.

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New Preps

preterite Academia, Culture, Politics, Rhetoric, Teaching

Like most of us, I’ve been adjusting to the pedagogical, administrative, and interpersonal exigencies of COVID-19. Like most of us, I’ve found some of those adjustments challenging, particularly as they relate to making workload allowances for students and myself — for me, being a single dad for three to four weeks at a stretch without available daycare has required some re-thinking of priorities. In the fall semester of 2020, I found myself teaching our graduate seminar in classical rhetoric (which we’re in the process of re-thinking, especially in light of the recent conversations in classics among folks like Shelley Haley, Shadi Bartsch, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Mary Beard, and others about the problems of whiteness) and our Digital Technology and Culture courses on information structures and the history of digital technologies as a one-course overload, which led me to do some of that re-thinking of priorities. And our enrollments for this coming fall are still in flux, so I wound up with the opportunity to teach a couple of courses that I haven’t taught before, which is kind of nice — I’ve been feeling the need for a bit of a pedagogical reset.

I’ll leave discussing the first new prep for last, because it’s for me the most interesting and challenging. But for the second new prep, there were only a few classes in the schedule that were needing to be taught and that I felt like I had the expertise and desire to teach. The first possibility was an open upper-division literature elective that only fulfilled elective requirements, and I wrote up a proposal for an elective in postmodern and experimental fiction, since that’s where a lot of my MFA coursework was. And because we’re trying to increase or at least maintain our enrollments, we’ve been encouraged to advertise the courses we’re offering, and I decided to take the opportunity to fool around with Photoshop and try to teach myself more about using layer masks and such. Not a great first effort, but I’m happy with what I learned from doing it:

experimental and postmodern fiction flyer
larger version, full version

And yeah, you can see my protanopia, I think, in addition to the other dubious design choices—I had to ask for help re which colors went with which. Beyond that, though, in putting together the syllabus I took a look around the web at other college courses teaching postmodern and experimental fiction—and it was saddening to see how white and how male the reading lists were. I mean, I know all the problems with authenticity arguments and such, but still, beyond the inevitable and to-be-expected sexism and racism still visible in much of American academia, there are even female scholars who publish on feminism without a single female author in their postmodern/experimental reading lists. My own reading list is only somewhat less homogenous, I’ll acknowledge.

Long story short, 492 is harder to fill than some of our other upper-division courses, and then the grad student who was scheduled to teach our course on the 20th-century novel while the usual faculty member to teach is on sabbatical decided not to, so I was asked if I’d be interested in doing that instead, and I said yes, with part of my thinking being that it would be a relatively easy adjustment to make in terms of content. Part of the question for me, beyond how to adequately represent the twentieth-century novel in English in a single semester’s readings, was then: how to represent those twentieth-century readings visually? I figure it’s not too controversial to select 9/11 as the marker of the cultural end of the 20th century, so then I found myself seeking visuals from around the beginning of the 20th century with similar themes, and a picture from mother of American modernism Georgia O’Keeffe seemed to mostly fit the bill, although with the actual painting dated 1926, I admit it’s stretching the bounds of contemporaneity. Certainly looks better than the first flyer to my amateur’s eye.

The 20th Century Novel flyer
larger version, full version

And you know what the biggest stumbling block was? Thinking I had to start with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. For whatever reasons—the zombie of the canon still rotting at the back of my unconscious, not being able to get past my own undergraduate experience, or whatever—that idea just would not get out of my head. Until finally, looking at that previous syllabus on Experimental and Postmodern Fiction and thinking about the problems with whiteness there made me stop and say: why do I keep thinking the twentieth-century novel needs to be defined by whiteness? How might it be otherwise? That line of thought helped me ask: what novel in English—American novel, I would say, because to my mind in many ways the twentieth century was the American century—would I want to define the beginning of the twentieth century? That was easy and immediate: Cane, and the metonymic way in which it embodies and anticipates so much of what comes after, culturally speaking. Once I recognized that, everything else fell easily into place, including the theming and the sequencing.

The cultural anxieties around race, truth, and trauma that I’ve been hinting at above and in the linked syllabi have been dominating my attention this past year, much as they have for many of us, and they coalesced in an alarming way around the 2020 election and its aftermath. The final course I’ll describe is one in rhetoric rather than literature, and it reflects and embodies those anxieties and the way I’ve been thinking about them since the events of January 6. Perhaps obviously, the tagline on the flyer—”We’re doomed. Now what?”—is shamelessly plagiarized from Roy Scranton’s book of the same name, but since I’m assigning Scranton in the course, I’m not going to worry about it too much. But yes, I’ve been trying to be mindful of the overdetermined nature of our continuing crisis, and examinations of that overdetermined nature seems to me to be part of what’s missing from many of the rhetorical analyses of and responses to that crisis.

flyer for English 460, the scope of rhetoric
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Here’s my take, and a big part of the animating spirit behind the design for 460: to my mind, the discourses surrounding the 2020 United States Presidential Election and its aftermath, culminating in the United States Capitol events of January 6, indicate a massive complex of problems in our national rhetorics. Writing curricula and the study of rhetoric—and especially academic programs in rhetoric and composition— offer possibly unique and powerful ways to respond to that complex of problems, potentially in ways that extend recent academia-wide conversations re-envisioning the democratic possibilities of the public land-grant university. This complex of overdetermined problems includes

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Warren Zevon’s Continuing Relevance

preterite Culture, Music, Politics

Warren Zevon died a little over 16 years ago, and while he’s mostly known today for his AOR hits (“Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Ah.” “Ah who?”), his deeper cuts (“Desperadoes Under the Eaves,” “The Hula Hula Boys,” “If You Won’t Leave Me I’ll Find Somebody Who Will”) are among my all-time favorite songs. There were a couple bits of recent news that made me cue up the playlist.

Seminole Bingo

I’m a junk bond king
And I’m on the run
Me and a friend of mine
We were headed for the sunshine

I got my hands on the wheel
I got gas in the tank
I got a suitcase full of money
From a Luxembourg bank

We didn’t stop ’til we got to Big Cypress
Wandered in to the Legion Hall
The sign outside said “Seminole Bingo”
Fell in love with the ping pong balls

And the SEC is far behind
Down in the swamp with the gators and flamingos
A long way from Liechtenstein
I’m a junk bond king playing Seminole Bingo

And my Wall Street wiles
Don’t help me even slightly
Cause I never have the numbers
And I’m losing nightly

I cashed in the last of my Triple B bonds
Bought a double-wide on the Tamiami Trail
I parked it right outside the reservation
Fifteen minutes from the Collier County Jail

And the SEC is far behind
Down in the swamp with the gators and flamingos
A long way from Liechtenstein
I’m a junk bond king playing Seminole Bingo

Mr. Bad Example

I started as an altar boy working at the church
Learning all my holy moves, doing some research
Which led me to a cash box labeled “Children’s Fund” —
I’d leave the change and tuck the bills inside my cummerbund

I got a part-time job at my father’s carpet store
Laying tackless stripping and housewives by the score
I loaded up their furniture and took it to Spokane
And auctioned off every last naugahyde divan

I’m very well acquainted with the seven deadly sins
I keep a busy schedule trying to fit them in
I’m proud to be a glutton and I don’t have time for sloth
I’m greedy and I’m angry and I don’t care who I cross

I’m Mr. Bad Example, intruder in the dirt —
I like to have a good time and I don’t care who gets hurt
I’m Mr. Bad Example, take a look at me —
I’ll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy

Of course I went to law school and took a law degree
And counseled all my clients to plead insanity
Then worked in hair replacement swindling the bald
Where very few are chosen and fewer still are called

Then on to Monte Carlo to play chemin de fer
I threw away the fortune I made transplanting hair
I put my last few francs down on a prostitute
Who took me up to her room to perform the flag salute

Whereupon I stole her passport and her wig
And headed for the airport and the midnight flight, you dig?
Fourteen hours later I was down in Adelaide
Looking through the want ads sipping Fosters in the shade

I opened up an agency somewhere down the line
To hire aboriginals to work the opal mines
But I attached their wages and took a whopping cut
And whisked away their workman’s comp and pauperized the lot

I’m Mr. Bad Example, intruder in the dirt —
I like to have a good time and I don’t care who gets hurt
I’m Mr. Bad Example, take a look at me —
I’ll live to be a hundred and go down in infamy

I bought a first class ticket on Malaysian Air
And landed in Sri Lanka none the worse for wear
I’m thinking of retiring from all my dirty deals
I’ll see you in the next life, wake me up for meals

A Clarification on Camelot

preterite Culture

There are good productions of the musical, and the best ones know that the musical is a tragedy, despite the fact that all its best songwriting is comedic, in the first half. If you watch it or listen to it, note: the first two songs (“I Wonder What The King Is Doing Tonight” and “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood”) mock the self-involved self-indulgence of their royal principals. That self-indulgence becomes the war-torn destruction of a culture. So yeah, I reject the critical dismissal of the musical as little other than a Kennedy-era bon-bon. “Fie On Goodness” in 1960 was an acknowledgement of the human element of war crimes, fifteen years after the Nuremberg trials.

On Receiving a Shipment of Computers

preterite Afghanistan, Computers, Culture, Economics

Several days ago, I accompanied the advisor team’s supply officer and the Afghans’ supply NCO on an overcast beige-sky afternoon with rainclouds threatening as they went to a warehouse to receive several dozen pallets of laptops. The forklift driver offloaded them from the trucks — one pallet teetered and toppled to its side, but fortunately no damage — and into the central aisle of the warehouse, where another soldier with a skid jack maneuvered them into secure chain-link cages that were then locked and taped, and the doors to the warehouse themselves locked and bolted. A feral cat had made its home in the corner of one cage among the sacks of grain and beans and stacks of boxes and crates, suspicious of people, but clearly healthy and able to find its own way in and out of the warehouse. I took pictures of the unloading. The supply officer was reluctant to have his picture taken signing for the computers with the Afghans and the contract representative.

Raymond Williams, in his (neglected?) essay “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” argues that there are some obstacles to actually understanding the means of communication as the means of production:

First, the means of communication, having been reduced from their status as means of social production, are seen only as ‘media’: devices for the passing of ‘information’ and ‘messages’ between persons who either generally, or in terms of some specific act of production, are abstracted from the communication process as unproblematic ‘senders’ or ‘receivers’. (51)

I’ve seen a rhetorical habit in some scholarship today that attempts to avoid or defuse or otherwise subvert this (what I see as valid) criticism of enthusiasms over “new media” by offering a caveat along the lines of but of course all media are material. We think that if we just say we’re doing Actor Network Theory enough, or what-have-you, we’ll be let off the hook for performing those generalizing and abstracting moves.

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Inside, Outside

preterite Academia, Afghanistan, Computers, Culture

Two meetings, less than a week apart. One is in a large room with black leather couches around the perimeter, the most senior person’s desk — this is his office — in the corner furthest from the door. More important people sit closer to the position of power; less important closer to the door. The floor is covered by two matching large 10 x 15′ Afghan rugs in black and red and green and white. In front of the couches there are faux-wood coffee tables with chrome feet and floral-design clear glass tops. A bookcase with sagging shelves sits in one corner. Gilt-framed maroon velvet bulletin boards hang on the walls with organizational charts and calendars and quotations in Dari, and framed plastic-covered maps bracket a gold-framed photo portrait of President Karzai in the place of honor between the windows.

The couches are filled: there are a total of nineteen people in the room. There is an initial speech of 25 minutes or so, noting academic issues that have come up, offering guidance. There is some discussion of the fact that a Web presence and a Facebook page for the Academy have been authorized, and that “These will solve most of our problems.”

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Hope When the Roads Turn Black

preterite Afghanistan, Composition Theory, Culture, Military, Politics

Things here seem to stay where people set them. Our mentor team rotates, here for 45 days or three months or six months or a year, and some of the Afghan instructors rotate in and out as well. In Lab 15, there are four dead computers gathering dust under desks and in corners — two Dells, two off-brand — in addition to the 20 sheet-shrouded operational computers running down either side of the long room with a single row of battered metal chairs facing front in the middle. There are computer parts in tattered cardboard boxes, a boombox for playing English-language listening and conversation practice cassettes and CDs, a DVD player, a VCR, a marker- and dirt-smudged Smart Board hanging on the wall. In the back corner of the room, there is a metal wheeled cart with a TV set and a dirty mug and three boxed sets of children’s games. Each of the operational computers has a small uninterruptible power supply next to it because of how unreliable the electricity is. Under the teacher’s desk, there are two more power supplies on their sides, unused, a white thermal carafe, styrofoam forms for packing electronics, woven reed baskets, a CRT and a 13-inch flat-panel monitor, remote controls hidden under stacks of years-old student papers, an empty rosewater bottle. The rooms we work in accumulate the detritus of instruction, including the superannuated technological capital associated with computer-based teaching.

afgh_mud_huts

When I first arrived here, I moved freely from my office overlooking the airfield to Lab 15 or to other classrooms to observe the Afghan teachers, though that freedom of movement was and is circumscribed by the boundaries of the small campus. It’s fenced on all sides, accessible only through checkpoints with gates, crew-served weapons, and armed guards. We drive past the airfield to get here: on one side the civilian Kabul International Airport that the Ariana and Kam and Safi jets fly out of with the few here wealthy enough to travel on them, and on the other the Mi-35 and Mi-17 helicopters and C-27 cargo planes of the Afghan Air Force. It was easy enough to take a break from working on the computer — before I learned to I needed to get out of the office and move in order to do my job — and watch the planes taking off and landing, just as I used to watch the cargo ships go up and down the Hudson from my office at West Point.

I see similarities to the large-scale mobility of the multinational military presence here — the helicopters and cargo planes, flying missions and materiel and personnel beyond, within, and across Afghanistan — in the critique Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu offer in “Composing in a Local-Global Context” (2009) of the formulation by which “success… is imagined in terms of the extra-territorial mobility achieved: the ability of the few across the world to constantly move, untied by emotion or responsibility to any one territory, identity, or career” (122). Transnational and transterritorial mobility is a marker of privilege, much as we see in “Globalism and Multimodality in a Digitized World,” where Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe, Gorjana Kisa, and Shafinaz Ahmed (2009) use “the term transnational… to signify a growing group of students who are at home in more than one culture… These students typically speak multiple languages, often including varieties of English from outside the United States, and maintain networks of friends, family members, and other contacts around the globe” (56). In some instances, mobility itself possesses agency, rather than the things that possess that mobility, as in Horner and Lu’s assertion that “the extra-territorial mobility of capital robs individual locales, lives, and lines of work of any vestige of stability” (123). The tribally and socially connected nature of Afghan culture feels deeply local, with little of the assumed privilege we associate with the American fetish for cars and planes and so-called footloose capital.

afgh_market_street

Since the recent incident, it’s become harder for Americans to move around the campus. We don’t go anywhere alone, and there’s a check-in and check-out system, and increased security measures all around. Body armor any time we go outside the gate, even if we’re still inside the wire. Within the gate, there’s little freedom of movement, and few places to go. We draw the shades in our offices, and I no longer watch the comings and goings of the planes.

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The Felt Bonds of the Social

preterite Afghanistan, Culture, Military, Personal

I stood in a hangar with hundreds of others this afternoon. There were the doors open to the airfield and the cloudless haze-blue sky and the sounds of aircraft outside above the hushed murmur. I stood with the small group I knew, surrounded by others we saw in passing or lived nearby or talked to or dined with, but apart from the occasional hug or pat on the shoulder or back, there was still the Western reserve — maybe appropriate, given the official nature of the event — but still entirely different from the emotional intimacy I’ve learned to expect from the Afghans.

That’s been the thing that’s been hardest for me to learn here. Americans are schooled to sublimate our emotions, and I think those who work for and with and in the military moreso than most, although academics do it as well. When Americans work, we work. We’re blinkered by our on-task orientation, our email screens, our lesson plans. With the Afghans, I certainly didn’t understand that the first thing to do was to sit down and have tea, and that the second thing to do was to sit down and have tea again and perhaps talk about one’s family, and that what was most important was the respect and shared common feeling and emotional well-being of those with whom one would meet and talk and perhaps, eventually, work. I got more mileage here — perhaps fittingly — out of a five-minute story about my brother’s wedding than I did out of hours of discussing ideas about teaching, pedagogy, and writing.

That extends here in strange ways. Greg Mortenson has seen bad press lately for the apparent lies and corruption connected to the projects he’s written about in Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools. Rory Stewart and Sarah Chayes talk about the apparent widespread acceptance of corruption in Afghanistan, and about the cavalier attitude toward some ideal of truth. I’m sometimes finding something similar. Afghans are amazing orators, especially when it comes to matters of pathos. What matters here is how you and your interlocutor feel about something: the facts are flexible. Questions of timeliness, validity, procedure, accuracy, cost, and accountability are all often secondary to the felt bonds of the social relationship. More than anything, the reciprocal ties of sociality are key.

It’s taken me three and a half months to start figuring that out; to start knowing that in practice. There are its corollaries: you respect the people you work with. As an American, you don’t argue with someone. You don’t make someone lose face. You accept someone’s hospitality. And if you’re going to build what you came to build, you can’t do it with weapons, or wearing body armor in your day-to-day interactions.

All of that has left me feeling unsettled, still, especially this afternoon in that hangar, when those bonds of the social were as quiet and solemn and solid as they were in our Western way, with those words about the enthusiasm sometimes forced and the determination with hearts sometimes heavy, and those words about having given the last full measure, and one by one people would stand at the call of their names until a name was called and no one stood, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another.

A Day

preterite Afghanistan, Culture, Education, Military

Six days of the week, I’m up at 0445 or 0545, depending upon whether I’m ambitious enough to make it to the gym or lazy enough to roll over in my bottom bunk for another hour’s sleep. I’m in one of seven tiny shower stalls in the men’s washroom by 0550 and dressed in my desert camouflage uniform and cap and sand-colored boots and walking down the road past the airfield and the International Joint Command headquarters to KBR Dining Facility #2 by 0620, where I’ll wash my hands at the automatic faucets over the stainless steel trough before scanning my meal card and taking a plastic tray and paper plate to the line, where I’ll get a bowl of oatmeal with some milk and a bowl of fruit cocktail mixed with fresh watermelon and plain yogurt, and sometimes half a danish. After breakfast, it’s back to the barracks to brush my teeth with bottled water — the wash water isn’t potable — and pick up my kevlar helmet and body armor and head downstairs to the vehicles. I usually ride in one of the two up-armored SUVs that always travel together, but our group has two mini-vans to travel in as well, though only the SUVs go outside the wire.

afgh_cold_dawn

Most days we don’t go outside the wire. Instead, we follow the perimeter road around the airfield through and past multiple separate gated checkpoints with armed guards, stone walls and Hesco barriers and concertina wire and machine guns on one side and concertina wire and Kabul traffic on the other. The drive takes less than half an hour, long enough to see the Afghan day workers waiting to get through the biometric identification at the gates, to see how thick the haze is over Kabul, to pass the truckers huddled around cookfires beside their blankets and brightly colored and decorated rigs on the side of the road and the half-built apartment buildings and the pack of wild dogs and the mine-clearing operation with its earth-mover and lone ambulance and woefully under-armored Afghans. The perimeter road is part paved and part potholed dust and gravel, mud and enormous puddles now in the rainy season. I’ve gotten used to the smell of Kabul, which is mostly the tang of diesel mixed with other scents of burning — plastic, sometimes cooking, woodsmoke — and kerosene, with a usually faint but omnipresent sour note of sewage.

construction_and_mountains

Much of the time, the building we work in has the same smells, though less intense. The bathrooms have straddle-style squat toilets with faucets and pitchers of water beside them for flushing. We work out of a few shared offices on one hallway that we share with the Turks and our translators; my own desk is next to the window in a long, narrow room that has six other desks and paint-peeling walls and books and maps and office supplies scattered everywhere, a reflection of its its transient nature, I suppose. The building is wired partly on the inside, with steel sleds suspended two feet from the ceiling carrying electrical and communication cables, and partly on the outside, with other wires going in and out windows and up the side of the building to a hodgepodge of dishes and antennae on the roof. Our internet is via satellite from France, and goes down as frequently as the power. Stray cats roam in and out of the building, begging loudly, but too cautious by experience to get close to humans. When some aspect of my job calls for me to communicate with students or faculty who don’t speak much English — my Dari is still limited to a few words and phrases, though I’m trying to learn in my off-time — I’ll go across the hall and ask for help from the translator assigned to me, S., who I was somewhat surprised to find is female.

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Everywhere It Looks

preterite Afghanistan, Composition Theory, Culture

I’ve made mistakes in my early interactions with Afghans, and I’m certain I will continue to do so. I’ve failed to sit down and have tea and chat for an hour, or two, when introducing myself, too eager in the Western way to hurry up and get things done. I’ve failed to ask about someone’s health and his family before asking about work. In Sarah Chayes’ account of her experiences in Afghanistan, The Punishment of Virtue, I find my own reflected, especially in her description of Westerners who

thought in institutional terms. Their mission, as some of them understood it, was to cultivate, encourage, and foster the fledgling Afghan government. And for most of them, that meant shoring up its ‘institutions’: its ministries, its courts, its provincial administrations.

Western political culture prompts us to think this way. Over the past three or four centuries, we in the West have designed and laboriously erected instituions as our bulwark against tyranny. And we have come to revere them, for they have indeed protected us. . . But Afghanistan is not there yet. In Afghanistan, loyalties and allegiances are to individuals. (169)

Individuals, not institutions. Not abstractions. As Chayes notes, “in Afghanistan, the exercise of power remains personal. There are no institutions; there are only powerful men” (163). I’ve presumed that work and the institutions I’ve associated with my work here — building democracy, infrastructure, an educational system — are more important than other things in the lives of the people I’ve met here, a foolish and myopic assumption easily belied by even my own experience.

Some of the dissonance I’ve been encountering — some of the ways in which I’ve felt challenged, stymied, held out, unable to do what seems or feels like my mission — has been a result of my expecting to do things in familiar Western ways, in my expectation that the merits of whatever I might try to do would be as self-evident here as they are (not that they always are, but even on the many times they aren’t, they’re at least arguable in accessible terms and ideologies) back in the U.S. Which is of course a simple enough expression of cultural difference, but still a reminder to me that I ought not try to pin down or make falsely familiar cultures to which I do not have access and of which I do not have membership. And the thing is, I see a lot of that in the scholarship on composition and world Englishes under globalization to which I’ve been turning for assistance.

That’s a problem for me. There are assumptions about the self-evidentiary nature of other cultures in that scholarship, as well, that make me want to point out that Afghan culture is no more homogenous than American culture; no more authentic in its inwardly lived experience or meretricious in its gregarious and manifest outward appearance; no more situated at the teleological end of a familiar historical tradition than American culture; no more possible to subjugate via knowing or explaining than American culture. Rather, and it took Bhabha to get me to start to see this, it’s constructed, narrated into being by its contacts internal and external, always already forming itself in relation to that which is reciprocally always already there, simultaneously that which is itself and that which is not itself and in which it defines itself against. That’s the theoretical way to put it, at least. In lived experience, it’s the translator who asks to go home to his house in Kabul because it’s snowing and his mud roof will cave in if he doesn’t shovel it; it’s the instructors who shrug and profess that they can do nothing about students being late to class since the Americans have objected to beating the students; it’s all these ruptures and fissures and limit cases that are instances of cultural difference always as a function of relation.

Bhabha explains it better than I do, noting that

the epistemological ‘limits’ of those ethnocentric ideas [“of the ‘grand narratives’ of post-enlightenment rationalism”] are also the enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices — women, the colonized, minority groups, the bearers of policed sexualities. For the demography of the new internationalism is the history of postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora, the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile, the grim prose of political and economic refugees. It is in this sense that the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, ambivalent articulation of the beyond that I have drawn out: ‘Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks…. The bridge gathers as a passage that crosses. (Introduction to The Location of Culture)

In my attempts to think about the ends of education as performed here in Afghanistan, what I’m running into is an experience of Afghanistan as the local and immediate space of difference between democracy and tribalism, village-building and nation-building, individual gain and communal advance. That’s fine: I can adjust, am adjusting, to that; doing my best, somewhat embarrassed at my initial arrogant assumptions about how little I might have to adjust myself, my perspective, who I am as a scholar and teacher and what I think I can be and know and do.

What’s not fine is that the more I read composition scholarship on multilingual pedagogies under the effects of economic globalization, the more I reject its remarkable eagerness to perceive its own privilege in others; the more I reject its unreflective emphasis on the privileges of “capital,” “networks,” “exchange,” “textuality,” “citizenship,” and especially the assumed privilege of traveling between. In these articles, there’s a narcissistic privilege that sees itself everywhere it looks, in the students who use computers just like we use them in the U.S., in the ways the homogenous capitalism just like we’ve produced in the U.S. is producing its homogenous effects in other countries just like we do at home.

I think of Pico Iyer’s description of the tourist and how we’ve replaced the blinkered imperialism of the traveler who complains that nothing abroad is the way it is at home with the blinkered imperialism of the traveler who complains that everything abroad is just like it is at home.