The notion that affirmation is itself a political act does nothing to alter political structures.

Pedagogies of alterity seek to manage the other within the American continuum without analyzing non-Western reality. The Third World is studied in many American universities under the umbrella of multiculturalism and I will take this pedagogy as my point of reference, with the understanding that its deficiencies are also applicable to postcolonial studies and what I perceive to be envisioned by theorists of the global South. The practical reason for such packagings of alterity is obvious: it is easy. It does not involve learning about another culture or demand learning another language. It feeds American isolationism. In the Internet age, when the globalization of English has contributed to diminishing the need to learn other languages, the other can be consumed "on the cheap." Such celebrations of diversity in no way compromise American tendencies toward cultural provincialism, triumphalism, or indifference to the world. The resounding global education that a literature student is offered can consist of nothing more than snippets from Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, or Maxine Hong Kingston (Talbot). Such pedagogies of alterity presume that one can grasp the world by reading selections from representative women of color writing in the English language. Moreover, such pedagogies provide a real incentive not to respect the intellectual history or genealogy of an underrepresented area of study. There is a tendency to act as if "anybody can play at anything" (Rapaport 2). Alterity scholars, without much homework, can create works of purported sophistication masking a selectively ignorant exploration and ensuring a general failure of engagement. By pretending to honor the other, they actually demean it. Such scholars are often unaware that this other (the black, Native American, Asian) possesses a history and body of scholarship of its own. To "study" them is not an "anybody-can-play-pickup" game performed on a wide-open, untrammeled field (Rapaport 2). Often the object of the game seems to be to reinvent the intellectual wheel; to boldly go where in fact others have gone before, to find the field with supposedly new "new scholarship" that evinces little or no sense of the discipline's genealogy. (Abel, Christian, Moglin 32) Ann Du Cille's complaint regarding African-American studies (Du Cille) speaks to the general problem of pedagogies of alterity: their appropriation of the other reveals not only ignorance but the hubris of those who wish to speak for and hence co-opt the Other. The political advantages of alterity scholarship are significant. While students learn little regarding the languages, literatures, histories or philosophies of other cultures, administrators and faculty can pretend that they all have somehow confronted the other. If you add texts to the curriculum marked by "otherness," then you have provided a non-threatening element of diversity, without having to engage real diversity. As practiced in universities and colleges in the U.S. today, alterity studies feeds institutional and individual desire for engagement and fosters the pretense that academic criticism can function as a political act. It supports the myth, common to poststructuralist theory, that textual culture can replace activist culture. A discourse of freedom, individuality and tolerance sustains cultural ignorance (Srivastava 16), while the alterity critic aspires to appear relevant on a global level. In this process, the real world and the variety of its literatures are eclipsed by this larger professional hegemonic project. Some Americans of color have learned to deconstruct such strategies of personal and professional development. There are those who recognize that fragmentary and acontextual representations of ethnic and subaltern identity are often promoted by an intellectual and administrative mainstream out of a deep cynicism regarding the other as a fossilized object of clinical experimentation. Multiculturalism, in particular, has been condemned as a patently deceptive and self-serving upper-class democratization (Fox-Genovese 142), providing a situation governed by a seemingly inclusionary logic of pluralism that only preserves the status quo (Okada 198). It has been recognized as fostering a discredited form of scholarship and canon formation. By packaging the world and its literature in order to satisfy a university's mandate for diversity, multiculturalism has been seen to represent an ethos of "free trade" theorizing for privileged academics (San Juan 226). As the Georgia episode highlights, theories and pedagogies of alterity often seek to include representatives of traditionally neglected groups and offer an alibi for liberal reform that may not, in fact, exist. In this effort, the educational system has manifestly entered the important promotional work of encouraging tolerance, pluralism, and diversity as well as rearguard damage control (Cruz 32). Under this format, theories and pedagogies of alterity (whether they be multiculturalism, postcolonialism, or the global South) can serve as an institution's strategic response to a perceived deterioration of the progressive policies, civil rights gains, and change in demographics. They address a national imperative to include courses on cultural diversity (i.e., non- Western material) in tertiary general education curricula. As a University of Wisconsin faculty committee expressed it, there is general belief that an ethnocentric view pervades mainstream curriculum and it "is restricted to the Euro-American experience. Excluded and left invisible are the people of color whose labor and sacrifices have been and continue to be neglected" (San Juan 224). Due to this situation, the committee claimed, American students have been made insensitive to and intolerant of cultural and ethnic difference. Another objective of the cultural diversity requirement at the University of Wisconsin was "to facilitate understanding of what it means to live in a society which may display hostility to the individual on the basis of stereotypes of fundamental, frequently unalterable characteristics of race, religion, sex, or national origin (Wald 5, cited in San Juan 224). In response to such concerns, policy conferences, workshops in teachers' conventions, publisher's marketing sessions, and curricula in schools throughout America now all target cultural diversity and multicultural literacy as prime directives. Multiculturalism thus served as a concession to earlier modes of exclusion. It cashed in on long-held promissory notes and provided payback (Cruz 31). Ideally, its mission should have been to question old definitions of knowledge and disciplines as defined by a Western canon of texts. But it never quite reached this level of sophistication. Other critics have been equally dismissive in their assessments. Wahneema Lubiano condemned multiculturalism as an empty abstraction used by administrators to take the political heat off their institutions for their failure to diversify (Lubiano 68). Noam Chomsky dismissed it as a form of fetishized knowledge. Multiculturalism flourished as a program while it weakened as a reality (Jacoby 124), since students were still held to Euro-American values for educational and life success (Guerrero 61). Studying the other in multiculturalism's thoroughly appropriated and diluted fashion ensured that the continued domination of Eurocentric knowledge remained unchallenged. Slavoj Zizek characterized it as an experience of the other deprived of its otherness. The idealized Other of multiculturalism dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while practices such as wife-beating remain out of sight (Zizek 11). Thus, multiculturalism has been judged to be nothing more than a subterfuge for business as usual. Can the global South promise anything different? Will it not fall prey to these same deficiencies, as postcolonialism has? The problem behind so many theories and pedagogies of alterity lies in the false consciousness of the critic who claims spokespersonship for the Other. One can offer a selection of ethnic or racially specific courses without addressing the ways in which the focus of what we understand as Western culture is itself incomplete and distorted (Lubiano 68). Just as Native American studies was brought onto campuses as a "polite pseudo-intellectual vehicle to provide the appearance of ethnic diversity" (Guerrero 56), so now Amerindian cultures can be included in curricula. In both instances, the subaltern cultural production provides validation for the supposed insights and conclusions of Euro-American academia. The indigenous tradition of scholarship is not studied in sufficient depth to offer an alternative to Eurocentrism and its institutions. The key concern with alterity pedagogies here is that identity is not simple a matter of positionality, nor is an ideology of alterity a way to recuperate sensibilities disintegrated by society and the labor market (San Juan 4). Such problems cannot be solved by university canon reform. The real problem is not just the texts that transmit the heritage of the humanities in order to preserve standards and promote excellence. Rather, the problem once again is one of who consumes the tasty salad. In more concrete and less flavorful terms, we can formulate the situation as follows: Who defines the standards of excellence and whose interests are at stake? Who should articulate the purpose and meaning of a humanities education and how? The multicultural battles at Stanford University over the revision of the canon met with considerable resistance from factions decrying the replacement of the classics from the Western tradition with lesser valued works from minority literatures. However, part of the resistance also stemmed from what was seen as the cooptative strategy behind such canon revision. Did not the process of liberalizing the canon by simple addition of non-Western texts betoken tokenization and exhibit a patronizing tolerance (Pratt 59, cited in San Juan 231)? If non-white materials are perceived as "add-ons" to white structures, they never address the centrality and dominance of the latter (Newfield and Gordon 87). Ultimately, difference should make a difference (Davis 48). The simple fact is that not only conservative think-tanks and champions of the Western canon criticized the institutionalization of alterity studies. Minority critics and students have also made their voices heard. At the University of Texas, Chicano students expressed their uneasiness regarding multiculturalism. They viewed it as a bland, catch-all phrase connected with diversified reading lists or required courses on non-Western cultures. They perceived it as a means of thwarting a head-on confrontation that should take place over institutional racism (San Juan 224). Their perception had a good deal of validity.