Towards an Ethics of Knowledge

In Geographies of Learning. Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance, Jill Dolan notes a persistent tension between academics and activists, one that positions "those who purportedly 'do' (as if one could 'do' without thinking)" against "those assumed only to 'think' (as if thinking could ever be merely so)." Ironically, this conflict sometimes manifests itself even in those disciplines that owe their institutionalization as academic fields of study to their ties with and histories as social movements advocating for social and political change. Not acknowledging this problem, Dolan suggests, often results in "expert" and "vernacular" knowledges working at cross-purposes when they might more productively align themselves in order to produce progressive policies. Moreover, leaving this antagonism unresolved can lead to "an unwitting alliance between radical activists and conservative scholars against progressive scholarship" (1). While the friction Dolan identifies can indeed impede the productive exchange of information between intellectuals and their activist counterparts, I would argue that for those of us who claim to be both academics and activists, it is necessary to focus on the particular ways in which this divide manifests itself in the teaching of multiethnic literatures as one that positions lived experience against critical examination, identity against identification. Furthermore, I believe that the spaces between these distinct positions are of paramount importance and must be maintained in order to accomplish the laudable goals that Dolan sets for higher education. Specifically, such goals include turning theory into practice and encouraging both our students and ourselves to make political commitments in the process of becoming better thinkers. Clearly, the space of the classroom and our pedagogical practices constitute a foundation from which we might not just envision but engineer the productive (ir)resolution of conflict and difference. As I suggest in this essay, the practice of multiethnic literatures produces both remarkable opportunity and anxiety. For those of us who commit ourselves to working in what some have disparaged as "victim studies," the issues of authority and legitimacy that were so contestatory while programs like Ethnic Studies were being established in institutions of higher education have taken on new forms. These challenges, less openly hostile and confrontational, are nonetheless still, and perhaps even more, operative at a time when public consensus about the goals and values of "diversity" +has seemingly been achieved and identity politics are derided as a kind of naive and idealistic posturing that refuses the theoretical insights produced by poststructuralism. (1) Given this context of covert challenges to those of us who teach multiethnic literatures and claim such texts as our professional field of study, the importance of formulating specific pedagogical practices through which a responsible model of knowledge production can be disseminated cannot be overestimated. In this essay, I argue for the need to frame explicitly in our teaching of multiethnic literature an ethics of knowledge and offer a set of strategies, derived from the literature itself, that can help us teach our students to be ethically oriented towards the study of alterity. The ethics of knowledge I propose here foregrounds the roles and responsibilities of authors, readers, and critics in the production of knowledge about those who are culturally different from themselves. Such an ethics would also address the humanistic impulse that many of our students are taught to celebrate--a valorization of similarity--and ask questions about the valuation of differences. In explicitly pursuing an ethics of knowledge, I argue that many of the traditional goals we set in order to evaluate pedagogical "success" (goals that include "mastering" the material, cultivating points of identification in order to effect intellectual inquiry, and producing in our students the pleasures that motivate academic enterprise) must be re-conceptualized if not actively countered. …