¿Qué Culpa Tengo Yo? Performing Identity and College Teaching

Educational Theory

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 37-51

  Alemán, Ana M Martinez ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007330326     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.1999.00037.x     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Amy Gutmann, "Introduction, " in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6.
2. Susan Wolf, "Comment, " in Gutmann, Multiculturalism, 84.
3. See John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: The Free Press, 1916). This book will be cited as DE in the text for all subsequent references.
4. Albita Rodriguez, "¿Qué Culpa Tengo Yo?" Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. (New York, 1995). Translation: Am I to blame for this drum, Which beats my life without mercy? Am I to blame for this insolence, To sweat out the sun from my inner soul? Listen well! Am I to blame for this heat, Which forged me to the peasant and the santera? Am I to blame for these hips? Am I to blame for this zest? Am I to blame for my blood rising? Am I to blame for having been born in Cuba?
5. In a recent article in The New York Times, 11 March 1997, B1-B6, two years after I first witnessed this performance, Deborah Son tag writes about Albita's audience chanting these words of their "theme song of their exile, " Sontag quotes one audience member as saying, that this song, these words, are his "personal anthem, " his "Star Spangled Banner, "
6. Gustavo Perez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
7. Peter McLaren, "White Terror and Oppositional Agency: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism, " in Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference, ed. Christine E. Sleeter and Peter L. McLaren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 56.
8. Homi Bhahba, "Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate, " in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57.
9. My use here of the term "mulato" is a deliberate appropriation of a highly charged and problematic term. My objective, much like the appropriation of the word "queer" by many gay and lesbian movements m the United States, is to turn its use on its head. The term "mulato" is understood as either the first generation offspring of a mule, or a person of mixed Black and Caucasian racial heritage. It is the hybrid between a horse and an ass. Thus, as "cultural mulatos, " we are mongrels, crossbreeds, mixbreeds. We are irreconcilable and stubborn, nonnormative, not one thing or another, partly biological, partly cultural. The term "dynamic assimilation" is used by David Henry Hwang, The New York Times, 10 November 1996, 13.
10. John Dewey, "Democracy in Education, " in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 3, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 234.
11. Charlene Haddock Scigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 145
12. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), 169. This book will be cited as EN in the text for all subsequent references.
13. John Dewey, "Democracy in Education, " 232.
14. John Dewey, "Academic Freedom, "John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 2, ed Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 53-66.
15. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1946).
16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33.
17. John Dewey, "President Hutchins's Proposals to Remake Higher Education, " in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 399-401.
18. John Dewey, How We Think (New York: D.C. Heath, 1933), 192.
19. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 209.
20. John Dewey, "The Problem of the Liberal Arts College, " in John Dewey, The Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 209.
21. Henry Giroux, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (Granby, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 87.
22. Peter McLaren, Schooling as Ritual Performance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
23. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 208.
24. Christine I. Bennett, Comprehensive Multicultural Education: Theory and Practice, 3d ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995).
25. Edmundo Desnoes, "Nacer en Espanol, " in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 264-267.
26. Christine Overall, "Feeling Fraudulent: Some Moral Quandaries of a Feminist Instructor, " Educational Theory 47, no. 1 (Winter 1997), 5-6.
27. McLaren, "White Terror and Oppositional Agency, " 56.
28. Bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989).
29. Steven T. Ostovich, "dewey, habermas, and the university in society, " Educational theory 45, no. 4 (Fall 1995), 471.
30. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 186.
31. McLaren, "White Terror and Oppositional Agency, " 54.
32. See, for example, Frances A. Mahar and Mary Kay Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
33. Dewey, The Ethics of Democracy, in John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882-1898, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967)18. See also Ana M. Martinez Alemán, "John Dewey: A Feminist Consideration of His Concepts of the Individual and Society, " unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1992.
34. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 93.
35. I find Cuban anthropologist Ruth Behar's account of self-exposure and translation especially helpful: RuthBehar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press: 1996).
36. Jacques Ranciere, "Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization, " in Rajchman, The Identity in Question, 66-67.
37. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) for a discussion of how knowing can often mean ignorance of principles, premises, and suppositions
38. Alfred Arteaga, "An Other Tongue, " in Arteage, An Other Tongue, 9.
39. John Dewey, "Academic Freedom, " in Boydston, John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 2, 53.