The Paradox of Freedom:

Featured in The Scholarship of Teaching: Faculty Development Through Cross-Campus Collaboration Volume. The City University of New York.

Engaging the Tension between Representation

And Canonization in the Classroom

Julie Bolt

Bronx Community College

Questions

How does one reconcile a monument that canonizes predominately dead white men with a culturally and economically diverse student body – men and women who are predominately brown? What messages does such a monument send to these young people, and how can we dialog to transform our encounter with ninety-eight bronzed busts from the past into a vision of active citizenship for the future?

These are some of the questions I found myself posing while participating in the cross-disciplinary NEH/CUNY seminar on The Hall of Fame for Great Americans. There is no doubt that Standford White’s monument is architecturally significant, providing an oasis from the urban bustle outside of campus. As a new faculty member at Bronx Community College, I delighted in the beautiful sun-speckled colonnade, which includes many of my favorite authors, important scientists, and some admirable revolutionary figures. Yet it also includes stretches of military heroes and politicians who worked directly against the interests of people who may well be ancestors of many of our students. I found it disconcerting there were very few individuals immortalized in The Hall of Fame who would have resembled our students at all. This absence is notable given all “the Great Americans” who emerged during abolition (before the last bust was installed) and the Civil Rights era (after.) I couldn’t ignore the disconnect with our student population, especially since the colonnade has several empty spots, and the memorial could, in theory, be expanded to be more inclusive.

These issues of canonization and representation led me to create a section of our freshman composition called “The Paradox of Freedom.” My goals for the course were for us to mutually explore ways that academic and cultural canons, as well as their accompanying ideologies, impact our social realities. Furthermore, I aimed for us to “fill in” some of the representational gaps in The Hall of Fame.

As stated in our syllabus: “We will use The Hall of Fame for Great Americans as a starting point to explore competing and contradictory notions of freedom, and ways writers, artists, and activists – including you – have tried to understand freedom and act in its interests.”

The Encounter

On a balmy late-August day, our first week opened with a tour of The Hall of Fame. Students were allowed time to contemplate and roam. I was interested in using this public space as a town square of sorts. I shared this intent with the students since it was important to me that we consciously transform the site into a space for dialog, a site of possibility and multiplicity.

Very few of our students had ever walked through The Hall of Fame before, or visited Gould Memorial Library – suggesting how easy it is to have something under one’s nose, but not “see” until it is required of us. Fortunately, students were overwhelmingly interested and engaged. To help focus our investigations, I asked them to read the plaques and consider the questions: Who is included? Who is left out? What Americans or social movements would we like to see represented? Also: What definitions of freedom and democracy are framed here, or neglected, and why?

When we returned to the classroom, the tour prompted extensive consideration of the historical and architectural importance of the site itself, and then turned to focus on the accomplishments of the many of the "Great Americans" honored. Several students recognized some of the historical figures but some knew few to none, indicating a significant cultural chasm. Similarly, some students were smitten with the pantheon represented at the monument, while others argued that there was a disproportionate lack of women represented – and only a few African Americans. Notably, two of the twenty-seven students in the class saw the desire for inclusion as “political correctness,” and with my background in post-colonial literature of the Americas, I felt compelled to point out the irony of the total absence of indigenous people.

When I asked students to compose essays defending who they would like to see represented, I received wide ranging responses. Hector Hernandez argued for Bill Gates, Mathew Perry (who opened up trade agreements with Japan), and Dr. Mary Dixon – one of the first doctors to make strides in women’s reproductive health. Another student, Evelyn Encarnacion, focused on popular contemporary humanitarians, such as Bono and Angelina Jolie. Evelyn writes, “I chose these philanthropic figures because they work to support and enhance the lives of others… The students at BCC can learn by the action of these heroes that we cannot have any future without education and health. Our students can learn through them how they apply their knowledge, their fortune, and their life to make the world a better place to live in.”

Still other students chose to research and write about more radical revolutionaries, with a considerable percentage choosing Malcolm X. Sabrina Carrero investigated The Young Lords – the Nuyorican Civil Rights group, maintaining their work needed to be revitalized today. Poignantly, one student took exception that The Hall of Fame was limited to Americans. As an African descendent, this student’s essay gestured to global citizenry, making an argument for the inclusion of Nelson Mandela.

As conversation developed, student response proved unpredictable as ideological tensions emerged in the classroom. I saw these tensions, and the emotional investment, as a fertile context to examine the “paradox of freedom.” Composition took on increased urgency as students explored questions such as: Why do we hold the positions we hold? Do we benefit from them? How often do we question our assumptions? Indeed, multiple truths were emerging. I pointed out that, like our classroom contestations, the choices made for canonization at The Hall of Fame were historically and ideologically bounded. We pondered how freedom for some was dependent on the enslavement of others and how genocide of Native peoples translated into Manifest Destiny for European descendents. These are just some of the paradoxes of freedom in America – and in all the Americas and colonial countries. However, the identification of social injustice as historical process also caused us to discover exciting voices of liberation and hope. It was not at all hard to claim “Great Americans,” both living and dead.

Discourse

Experiencing and critiquing the colonnade became a means for students to engage their critical consciousness and encourage a sense of agency. My hope was that our encounter could help us deconstruct inherited social roles, economic and political barriers, and deterministic notions of identity.

As we explored paradoxical notions of “freedom,” I defined “discourse” as it is used it post-colonial theory: a bounded set of beliefs that are socially constructed. I found this definition to be useful in examining power relations and individual identities. Discourse theory also helped students contextualize the canonization of the busts in The Hall of Fame within the socio-political times that they were selected. Understanding that canons reflect historical power struggles helped students recognize that concepts “freedom” and “democracy” change over time, and can continue to change in their own interests.

Significantly, our problematizing of discourse urged us to reflect on our own assumptions and modes of reasoning. No matter how deeply felt, many of us were able to contend with our own belief systems as subjective truths that reflect not only our experiences, but inculcations from the media, academic and religious institutions. It is my feeling that The Hall of Fame can be engaged in similar ways across academic disciplines. Similarly, the monument invites room for critique and for expanded historical and contextual questioning.

Counter-Discourse

After problematizing canons and our own notions of objectivity and subjectivity, I used The Hall of Fame for Great Americans to add dimension to the meanings of the busts represented there. Through a historical arc, we read, discussed, and questioned the words of revolutionary nineteenth century figures that were ignored in the Hall of Fame, such Sojourner Truth, Sitting Bull, and Frederick Douglass. Then we engaged in a re-visioning of Walt Whitman – who is included in the Hall of Fame – but was not then popularly seen as openly Gay voice, or the abolitionist and feminist that emerged in our reading of “I Sing the Body Electric.” Finally, we explored more contemporary voices, such as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, and Spokane native writer Sherman Alexie – individuals whose writing overtly and playfully challenges the sacredness of institutional canons. I can see similar productive resistance and dialog emerging in courses from other disciplines, including History, Arts, Politics, and Science, since individual are canonized (and not canonized) in those and other fields.

As we filled in some of the discourse gaps from The Hall of Fame, students increasingly began to see recorded “knowledge” as contestable, based on subject-positions, recognizing how several truths can sit side by side. Sometimes decentering notions like “freedom” and “democracy” was frustrating, for there is comfort in the easily coherent. Still, many students were quick to counter encroaching complacency, holding that contending with complexity is more useful for social change than accepting sanitizing homogeneity.

Agency

Critical pedagogy theorist Peter McLaren (1992) has stated: “We need to develop a praxis that gives encouragement to those who, instead of being content to visit history as curators or custodians of memory, choose to live in the furnace of history.” Here McLaren politicizes the education process in the best sense of the word. It is in this sense that my experience teaching “The Paradox of Freedom” as an outcome of the NEH/CUNY seminar demonstrated that we can become conscious of the process of history-making. If we do not run from paradoxes, we can deconstruct the rhetorics and ideologies that shape them, and in the process become more self-aware about what kind of relationship we want with our world.

By the end of the semester, students such as Abdul Buhari felt increased agency and hope to address injustice as global citizens. In an essay on global warming Abdul wrote, “Even though it might look and sound like there is no hope for the future, it’s never too late if we determine to reinvent the wheel.” Similarly Alan Harris wrote about the hope of a revitalized UN as the world’s best hope for peace.

After much writing, reading, and debating, The Hall of Fame transformed from a relic of past ideologies to a space for making new knowledge collectively with others. The texts we read, wrote, and spoke took on the life of an ongoing dialog for social transformation, a contact-zone of both contestation and possibility. Our investigations of the tensions between representation and canonization encouraged us to practice reflexivity, investigate counter-discourse, and ponder modes for social change.

* * *

It is now late fall and leaves are scattered throughout the colonnade. There are ghosts dancing amongst the bronze busts. They speak in multiple vernaculars and idioms. We take our second walk and hear them. We can sense that the Great Americans are also in the monuments’ empty spaces and unwritten words.

But that’s not all. They are also in the teeming classrooms in the buildings that surround the busts – and moving through its temporal path are global citizens, our students, traveling into stories and histories yet to come.

References

McLaren, P. (1992). Critical Literacy and Postcolonial Praxis: A Freirian Perspective. College Literature, 19, 7–27.

Whitman, W. (1975). I Sing the Body Electric. Leaves of Grass: The Complete Poems, NY: Penguin.