More on the Canon or Cirriculum

This is again from "Soldiers of Misfortune," referenced in my last post.

"Predictably, both D'Souza and Kimball cast the debate over the canon in typical Manichean fashion--as the West vs. the Rest, as a choice between "culture and barbarism," as a titanic struggle between forms of civilized "high" culture (read: White, Western) and the "primitive," contaminating forces of "other" low-brow cultures (read: non-White, non-Western) thereby reinscribing the rigid binomial opposition of "ours" and "theirs" characteristic of neocolonial discourses ( Said, 1978:227-228). From the standpoint of conservative authors, any interrogation of the canon becomes commensurate to threatening the foundation of Western civilization and is branded as an exercise in ideological brainwashing. Thus Kimball suggests that:

In this war against Western culture, one chief object of attack within the academy is the traditional canon and the pedagogical values it embodies . . . Instead of reading the great works of the past, students watch movies, pronounce on the depredations of patriarchal society, or peruse second or third-rate works . . . after four years they will find that they are ignorant of the tradition and that their college education was largely a form of ideological indoctrination. ( Kimball, 1990:xii-xvii)

The trepidation and sanctimonious indignation that typifies this perspective rests on a defensiveness in which all "others" are seen as enemies intent on ravaging "our" civilization and way of life. In this account, the hard-fought changes which multiculturalists have wrought come to epitomize the debasement of all "authentic" Western culture. The "we" and "our" constructed in conservative narratives is highly exclusive. We, as Whites of European descent are civilized; intellectually and morally superior; and represent the highest standards of cultural achievement. The "multicultural" presence is thus constructed as a problem or threat against which "a homogeneous, white, national 'we' could be unified" ( Gilroy, 1991:48)."

An extremely straightforward examination of this movement; perhaps a bit too straightforward. Anyway i'm on the road as mentioned yesterday; so this will be it for a while; I might be back this afternoon.