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Abstract
In many post 9/11 classrooms in the United States, the rhetoric of freedom has been usurped by a rhetoric of patriotism, which questions any speech or activity that dissents from the dominant discourse of American military might/right. Such an opening took the form of focused discussions in three classes on the relationship of patriotism and dissent, and their (perceived) intersection with religion, political party, and public personas. The cultural context was a statewide controversy when Michael Moore was invited to speak at a nearby educational institution. Students were asked to discuss what made Michael Moore (un)patriotic—and how they defined patriotism or its opposite. As a follow-up to the discussions, students in other classes were asked to write about what made students and faculty appear patriotic or not. In this paper I map what it means to perform various positionalities/discourses of patriotism versus nationalism in the classroom for both students and faculty, particularly when intextuated with the body politics of academic and student freedoms as heroic quests. More personally, I describe my own struggle to create Giroux's “emancipative rationality,” which seeks social justice, when a “reflective inquiry” approach is the safer path. When all performances and positionalities are equal and uncontested, “democracy” remains safe as the status quo in a post 9/11 world and classroom.
A version of this essay was presented at the 2005 annual conference of the National Communication Association in Boston, Massachusetts.
A version of this essay was presented at the 2005 annual conference of the National Communication Association in Boston, Massachusetts.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Leda Cooks and especially George Cheney for their insights and suggestions. She also thanks John Sloop and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback in shaping this manuscript.
Notes
A version of this essay was presented at the 2005 annual conference of the National Communication Association in Boston, Massachusetts.
1. Henry A. Giroux and Susan S. Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 51. The Introduction credits chapter 1, in which this story appears, to Susan Giroux's dissertation.
2. Giroux & Giroux, 24.
3. Each of the following pedagogies share a common general purpose to enable students to challenge dominant ideas and create progressive social change where they see the need: For critical pedagogy, see Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2001); for pedagogy of the heart, see Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Heart, trans. Donald Macedo and Alexandre Oliveira (New York: Continuum, 2000); for pedagogy of hope, see Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era (New York: Routledge, 1995); for pedagogy of possibility, see Roger I. Simon, Teaching Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1992); for situated pedagogy, see Ira Shor, “Educating the Educators,” in Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching, ed. Ira Shor, 7–32 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987); for pedagogy of discomfort, see Michalinos Zembylas and Megan Boler, “On the Spirit of Patriotism: Challenges of a ‘Pedagogy of Discomfort,’” Teachers College Record, 12 August 2002, http://www.tcrecord.org (accessed 7 October 2006).
4. Giroux and Giroux, 279.
5. Ira Shor, “War, Lies, and Pedagogy,” Radical Teacher 77 (2006): 33.
6. Axson-Flynn v. Johnson, 2004, United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit, http://www.kscourts.org/ca10/cases/2004/02/01-4176.html (accessed 8 October 2006).
7. W. Barnett Pearce, and Vernon K. Cronen, V. K., Communication, action, and meaning: The creation of social realities (New York: Praeger, 1980).
8. Henry A. Giroux, Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics: Redrawing Educational Boundaries (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 155.
9. Henry A. Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 66.
10. The Big One, videocassette, directed by Michael Moore (1997; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney, 1998).
11. For more nuanced discussions on the differences of nationalism and patriotism, see Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), chapter 1; Linda J. Skitka, “Patriotism or Nationalism? Understanding Post-September 11, 2001, Flag-Display Behavior,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35 (2005): 1996–1997; Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18, 101–2; Andrew Vincent, Nationalism and Particularity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 90, 109–33.
12. Steven Salaita, “Ethnic Identity and Imperative Patriotism: Arab Americans Before and After 9/11,” College Literature, 32, no. 2 (2005): 154
13. Eammonn Callan, “Democratic Patriotism and Multicultural Education,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 21 (2002): 469.
14. Callan, 471.
15. Dennis K. Mumby, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Communication Studies: A Rereading of an Ongoing Debate,” Communication Theory, 7 (1997): 5, 17.
16. Leda Cooks, “Pedagogy, Performance, and Positionality: Teaching about whiteness in Interracial Communication,” Communication Education, 52 (2003): 246.
17. Mumby, 14.
18. Mumby, 17.
19. Barry Kanpol, Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999): 35–36.
20. David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006). For a discussion of Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights, see Daniel Hellinger, “How Conservatives Are Trying to Control Speech on College Campuses,” St. Louis Journalism Review, 36, no. 282 (January 2005/February 2006): 10.
21. Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains: Confronting the Military–Industrial–Academic Complex (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007).
22. Giroux, 2007, 4.
23. Giroux 2001, 179.
24. Giroux 2001, 190.
25. Giroux 2001, 199.
26. Giroux, 2007, 116.
27. Jane R. Martin, Cultural Miseducation (New York: Teacher's College Press, 2002).
28. Peter Wilshire, “Michael Moore's ‘Fahrenheit 911’ and the US Election: A Case of Missed Opportunity?” [Electronic version], Screen Education, 39 (2005): 130.
29. Gail Smith-Arrants (18 November 2004). “College Teacher Shows ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’ Gets Rebuked; Film Shown Before Elections in Class on English Composition,” Charlotte Observer, 18 November 2004, http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikinthenews/index.php?id=331.html (accessed 5 October 2006).
30. Jonathon Knight, Wendi Maloney, Martin D. Snyder, and Gwendolyn Bradley, “University Administrators Bar Speakers” [electronic version], Academe 91 (January/February 2005).
31. Jennifer Fu, “Michael & Us”[electronic version], Education Week 24, no. 21 (February 2005).
32. David R. Keller, “Homogeneity and free speech in Utah” [electronic version], Academe, 91 (September/October 2005).
33. John Gravois, “The Making of a Political Circus” [electronic version], Chronicle of Higher Education, 51, no. 9 (22 October 2004).
34. Giroux, 2001; McLaren, 1995; Shor, 1987, 24.
35. Freire, 31.
36. McLaren, 77.
37. Donna Harraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” in Feminist/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1990), 222.
38. McLaren, 76.
39. The questionnaire and quantified results are shown in the Appendix. Questions 1–6 and 9 were used initially for the senior seminar. I added questions 7 and 8 for the next two classes, based on the flow of the first class's discussion. The total numbers of written student responses are provided after the binary questions to show students’ initial views of the ties between patriotism, political and religious affiliation and the situational appropriateness of public dissent for public figures, and when/where dissent should occur.
40. Valerie J. Janesick, “The Choreography of Qualitative Research Design: Minuets, Improvisations, and Crystallization,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonne S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 393.
41. Leonie Huddy and Nadia Khatib, “American Patriotism, National Identity, and Political Involvement,” American Journal of Political Science, 51 (January 2007): 72.
42. Margaret Nash, “‘How to Be Thankful for Being Free’: Searching for a Convergence of Discourses on Teaching Patriotism, Citizenship, and United States History,” Teachers College Record 107, no. 1 (2005): 224.
43. Oneida Meranto, “The Third Wave of McCarthyism: Co-opting the Language of Inclusivity,” New Political Science, 27, (June 2005): 215.
44. “Republic Really at Risk,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial Board, 3 February 2005. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/210464_firstamended.html (accessed 3 February 2007).
45. Bryant K. Alexander and John T. Warren, “The Materiality of Bodies: Critical Reflections on Pedagogy, Politics, and Positionality,” Communication Quarterly, 50 (2005): 336]
46. John Gehring, “States Weigh Bills to Stroke Students’ Patriotism” [electronic version], Education Week, 21, no. 28 (2002).
47. Chester E. Finn, “Teaching Patriotism—With Conviction,” Phi Delta Kappan 87 (April 2006): 580.
48. Diane Ravitch, “Should We Teach Patriotism?” Phi Delta Kappan 87 (April 2006): 580.
49. Joel Westheimer, “Politics and Patriotism in Education,” Phi Delta Kappan 87 (April 2006): 618.
50. Bill Bigelow, “Patriotism: ‘Us’ and ‘Them,’” Phi Delta Kappan 87 (April 2006): 605.
51. Nash, 221. This percentage can be deduced by tallying the numbers of outlier responses in Table 1 of her research.
52. John W. Howard and Laura C. Prividera, “Gendered Nationalism: A Critical Analysis of Militarism, Patriarchy, and the Ideal Soldier,” Texas Speech Communication Journal, 30, no. 2 (2006): 135. See also, Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press).
53. Vincent, 130.
54. Vincent, 119.
55. Russ Baker, “Want to Be a Patriot? Do Your Job,” Columbia Journalism Review 41, no. 1 (2002): 78. Addressing reporters, he ends his essay telling them to “ask tough, even unpopular questions when our government wages war.”
56. Huddy and Khatib, 64.
57. Nash, 218, borrows this phrase from Robert Stevens, A Thoughtful Patriotism (Washington, DC: National Council for Social Studies, 2002).
58. Billig, 8.
59. Billig, 22.
60. Michael Edwards, Civil Society (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004), 97.
61. Harry C. Boyte, “Civic Education and the New American Patriotism Post-9/11,” Cambridge Journal of Education 33, no. 1 (2003): 89.
62. Boyte, 90.
63. Vincent quotes Tolstoy's phrase, “collective hypnotism,” adding that it has been “grafted onto a people by state institutions for their own nefarious purposes, 118.
64. Giroux and Giroux, 111.
65. Shor, 2006, 31.
66. Jim Applegate, “Critical Engagement and Social Change Are Sometimes Strange Bedfellows,” Spectra 37, no. 2 (February 2001): 2. As president of the National Association Communication, Applegate was making a plea for more engaged research and service learning.
67. McLaren, 1995, 98.
68. Salaita, 155.
69. Salaita, 156.
70. The high school study is cited by Roger Kimball, “Institutionalizing Our Demise: America Vs. Multiculturalism,” The New Criterion (June 2004): 8.
71. Callan, 472.
72. Huddy and Khatib, 71–72, use four separate, distinct determinants of national attachment: national identity, constructive patriotism, symbolic patriotism, and uncritical patriotism. Black students were lower in all four determinants compared to other students. However, in an earlier 1996 general population survey, blacks’ lower levels of national pride disappeared when the two items that referred to pride in the equal treatment of groups and in the country's history were removed from the national pride factor.
73. For recent statistics on continued racial inequity in the United States, across the institutions of education, criminal justice, the labor market, health care, housing, etc., see Michael K. Brown, Martin Cornoy, Elliot Currey, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Majorie Shultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color Blind Society (Berkeley, CA: University of CA Press, 2003).
74. George Cheney and Daniel J. Lair, “Elevating Dissent and Transcending Fear-Based Culture at War and at Work, Dissent and Failure of Leadership, ed. Steven P. Banks (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, in press). These quotes come from their unpublished manuscript.
75. Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Portland House, 2007), 1057.
76. Giroux, 2001, 187.
77. Giroux and Giroux, 242.
78. Zembylas and Boler.
79. Zembylas and Boler.
80. Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne, “Education for Action: Preparing Youth for Participatory Democracy” in Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader, ed. William Ayers, Jean Ann Hunt, & Therese Quinn (New York: The New Press, 1998): 17.
81. Giroux and Giroux, 26–28, describe the actions of ACTA. For a detailed examination of ACTA's reports, see the chapter, “The New McCarthyism” in Sandra Silberstein, War of Words: Language, Politics, and 9/11 (New York, Routledge, 2002), 127–47.
82. Thomas L. Tedford and Dale A. Herbeck, Freedom of Speech in the United States, 5th ed. (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 2005), http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/yates.html (accessed 2 March 2007).
83. Stanley Fish, “There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too,” in Debating P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses, ed. Paul Berman (New York: Dell, 1992), 245.
84. Stanley Fish, “Why We Built the Ivory Tower,” New York Times on the Web (21 May 2004), http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/archive/June2004/StanFishwhywebuiltivorytower060104.htm (accessed 3 April 2007).
85. Robert L. Ivie, “A Presumption of Academic Freedom,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27 (2005): 79.
86. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. I (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
87. David E. Purpel, Moral Outrage in Education: In Search of a Democratic Solution (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 12.
88. Nicholas C. Burbules and Rupert Berk, “Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy: Relations, Differences, and Limits,” in Critical Theories in Education: Changing Terrains of Knowledge and Politics, ed. Thomas S. Popkewitz & Lynn Fendler (New York: Routledge, 1999), 54.
89. Burbules and Berk, 55.
90. Cheney and Lair, 6.
91. See, for example, Jim Nelson Black, Freefall of the American University: How Colleges Are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2006), and Ben Shapiro, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2004).
92. For details about the sources and targets of institutionalized pressures, see Baker, 2002; Giroux and Giroux, 2004; Meranto, 2005; and Silberstein, 2002.
93. Judith S. Trent, “Prospects for the Future: The Communication Scholar as Citizen,” Communication Studies 51: 189–94.
94. Giroux, 2004, 69.