While scholars in the humanities hotly debate identity as a theoretical issue, we rarely consider the indispensable role of identity in the real acts of reading, teaching, and everyday living. All of us are socialized to read texts from a located viewpoint, what we might call a reading identity. One’s reading history profoundly affects how one interprets, values, and appreciates narratives, especially when they represent unfamiliar and even threatening worlds. When imaginative students and scholars become aware of this location, they often reconsider their views, and thus guide their own intellectual and moral growth. In this regard, reading is perhaps the most socially transformational process one will ever undergo. Coming to a text from this socialization, we never read alone, but in question or defense of a community. And certainly in the university, we read as part of a collective social process. From this view of reading and identity, classrooms resemble social laboratories in which one may gain true cultural literacy. Organizers of “Reading Identity” wish to look closely at the ways we read various kinds of texts in and out of the classroom, and to imaginatively develop new ways of reading to accommodate a diverse twenty-first century classroom.
Because reading is an unavoidably communal, social process, we wish to consider the theoretical relationship of literary analysis to pedagogy. Project organizers begin with the understanding that interpretation is a process deeply engaged with social conditions. An idea eminent to the creation of the American university, the protection of free thought enables the production of new knowledge among individual scholars in the academy. In a similar manner, “good” readings of literary and social texts rely not on the solitary, disinterested eye of the reading subject, but on creating the “right” classroom conditions for them to emerge. Out of this linkage of reading and teaching grows the best justification for multiculturalism in the classroom: the protection of student diversity guarantees we recover readings that perhaps have been historically suppressed, and create altogether new readings, as a dialogic classroom community. From this conception of reading as a social, knowledge-seeking process, project participants plan to consider how we may produce better readings, more objective social knowledge, to inform scholars’ views of reading, teaching and identity politics.
Through years of collaborative research among scholars in various disciplines and at various universities, organizers of the Project for the Future of Minority Studies have developed an alternative “realist” approach to such topics as social identity, experience, and objectivity, to benefit social programs for multiculturalism, feminism, and internationalism. This realist theory argues what is called identity politics is not only an aspect of social justice but also a producer of knowledge. Because identities help us interpret the world, they should be protected and developed in and out of the classroom. For this reason, realists argue, the recognition of minority identity should be viewed not as a temporary compensatory program, but as an ongoing commitment to producing better knowledge in the university and the world. In this way, the realist theory finds minority identity to support and complement a broader humanity we often associate with moral universalism and the protection of human rights, equality, and treaties. From this view of multiculturalism and objective knowledge, we can begin to foster understanding across differences.
With the conference “Reading Identity,” organizers hope to open a productive discussion about theories of identity in the humanities. We have seen increasing attacks on minority studies programs by conservative scholars, who claim that identity-based programs produce scholarship founded on social exclusions with little claim to the world, or that these programs risk dividing our democratic society. Among some progressive scholars, identity is also a troubled concept that inspires only critique, as if real subordinated people were not in need of practical solutions. With the above concerns, we organizers have set out to engage scholars in the humanities today on the role of identity in places that all of us value: the act of reading and the practice of teaching.