Henry Giroux
Border Pedagogy as Postmodern Resistance (1991) (excerpt)
In the following selection, Henry A. Giroux provides a context in which postmodern thought can have an impact on education. Although he speaks specifically to the issue of racism, his comments also can be extended to additional forms of “Otherness,” including gender and class identities. Notice his emphasis on how the totalizing nature of Eurocentric discourses freezes out other discourses and how inclusion of the voices of Others can enrich not only the lives of students but the lives of teachers and the larger society, as well. Within the current historical conjuncture, the political and cultural boundaries that have long constituted the meaning of race and culture are beginning to shift. . . . First, the population of America’s subordinate groups are [sic] changing the landscapes of our urban centers. . . . Second, while people of color are redrawing the cultural demographic boundaries of the urban centers, the boundaries of power appear to be solidifying in favor of rich, white, middle and upper classes. . .. The dominant discourses of modernity have rarely been able to address race and ethnicity as an ethical, political, and cultural marker in order to understand or self-consciously examine the notions of justice inscribed in the modernist belief in change and the progressive unfolding of history. In fact, race and ethnicity have been generally reduced to a discourse of the Other, a discourse that regardless of its emancipator or reactionary intent, often essentialized and reproduced the distance between the centers and margins of power. Within the discourse of modernity, the Other not only sometimes ceases to be a historical agent, but is often defined within totalizing and universalistic theories that create a transcendental rational white, male, Eurocentric subject that both occupies the centers of power while simultaneously appearing to exist outside time and space. Read against this Eurocentric transcendental subject, the Other is shown to lack any redeeming community traditions, collective voice, or historical weigh—and is reduced to the imagery of the colonizer. . . . If the construction of anti-racist pedagogy is to escape from a notion of difference that is silent about other social antagonisms and forms of struggle, it must be developed as part of a wider public disclosure that is simultaneously about the discourse of an engaged plurality and the formation of critical