Controversia: Subaltern Studies Pt. 2

Is there a Subaltern pedagogy & how does the field influence the instruction?

Borderlands & Subaltern rhetorician/scholar Damian Baca, author of Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures) (summary & review) took some time to provide me with his perspective on pedagogy.

Having had a distinct interest in post-colonial literature & criticism, I am curious about the field of how Subaltern studies would influence the pedagogical practices of those in the field.

CM: I was wondering if there's a particular pedagogy that goes along with Subaltern Studies. Do you find yourself using a particular lens through which you approach teaching?

DB: My own interpretation is an epistemological shift of placing the "subaltern" at the very center of intellectual and creative thought. Unlike others in rhet/comp, I apply this to both teaching *and* scholarly inquiry. Rhet/comp "writes about" the disenfranchised within U.S. borders, but they do not "think and write from" subaltern and hemispheric perspectives... Another reason has to do with the dominant Eurocentric pedagogy and history of the field... The field turns to "whitened" Greeks and Anglo-Saxon thinkers and Western European philosophers and Euro-American pedagogues. What if we flipped the script? What if we learned nothing at all about Western-Anglo civilization other than the literacy of poor white folks in Appalachian countrysides? And then spent the rest of our studies learning about Maya writing and Aztec philosophy and Chicano rhetorics and AfroCuban anthropology? This would require an epistemological shift of global proportions.

CM:I spoke with other Borderlands rhetoricians who finds a feminist lens reoccurs in her different pedagogical practices.

DB: For me, questions of classroom pedagogy are always linked to political commitment, ethical practice, and intellectual investment. In other words, pedagogy goes far deeper than "how do I teach my first-year students of color?" inquiries that dominate the field. Notice how nobody asks about a third-year pedagogy for students of color, or a pedagogy for first-year graduate students, or a "minority" graduate student's right to their own pedagogy?

There's something empowering about the term 'minority grad student', no? This makes me wonder if there have been courses that I responded with more interest to given the teaching style of the professor. More later...

Controversia: Subaltern Studies

Is there a Subaltern Pedagogy & would it lend itself to a Latin Lens?

When comparing pedagogical approaches, it's easy to become caught in a negative capability of differences and similarities within Western philosophy & application that the perspective of the subaltern is ignored. Is it a splitting of pedagogical hairs if the comparisons vary in slight degrees of Critical, Latino, Chicano & LatCrit categories? Is there a way to come at teaching from the literacies of the under-represented and speak from a classical education/codex literacy that privileges the marginalized who are almost never heard from?

Some Latino pedagogies emphasize what can be called funds of knowledge, or the literacies that students learn outside the classroom, like corridos & traditional wisdoms that are passed down through informal-mama-in-the-kitchen-wrapping-tamales-as-she-tells-it-how-it-is. From what I understand of Subaltern Studies, it seems as though these funds of knowledge are followed back to the classical roots of indigenous knowledge & wisdom that was oppressed during colonization.

Subaltern is defined as:

Subaltern Studies seeks to engage the subaltern as an ally and participant in the academic process through modified research methodologies that describe the subject on its own terms, instead of recasting it as the “other” of the dominant culture. This means that academics must both modify their own methodologies and perspective to allow for the differences between their hegemonically centered view and that of their subjects and seek to establish new relationships between themselves and the subaltern populations that they are studying (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group 121).

A colleague and Subaltern scholar at U of A referred me to this extremely informative Subaltern site at OSU.

Unlike critical pedagogies that challenge the dominant/hegemonic beliefs, a Subaltern approach to pedagogical practices seems to draw attention to pictographic texts that require different kinds of literacy that simultaneously possess deeper wells of knowledge than generally celebrated when the literature of people of color is the focus.

More later...