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Race, Identity, and Representation in Education. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, eds. New York: Roudedge, 1993. 329 pp.
Louise Saldanha
The immediate assumption that the recent bombing in Oklahoma City was the result of Middle East terrorism is but the latest in a long line of global racial narratives. We live in a time where traditional assumptions about race, ethnicity, nation, and identity are being radically destabilized, a historical moment that is terrifying for some and liberatory for others. As the editors note, events like the Los Angeles riots, the Oka crisis in Canada, the Gulf War, and the resurgence of ethnic nationalisms in Eastern Europe coincide with worldwide debates surrounding the ways in which racial differences are (re) produced within educational institutions and circulated as commonsense knowledges within society. While multiculturalism, as an ideology and, in Canada, as an "official" government policy, has emerged as a way of containing diversity, it also offers itself as a tool for a radical pedagogy that reconfigures "difference," without securing it in any way. If the classroom is one of the places where ideas about race and identity gain currency, it is also the place where these ideas can be critiqued, resisted, and reworked. Thus, the classroom cannot be a place where theory functions as something apart from practice. Bringing together essays from a wide variety of disciplines, Cameron McCarthy's and Warren Crichlow's Race, Identity, and Representation in Education challenges accepted curricular and pedagogical treatments of race and works to expose the ideological alignment of educational institutions with racist social practices. The contributors to this accessible and rich collection disrupt hegemonic constructs of race by offering strategies that materially intervene in knowledge production, mapping the classroom as an important and potentially liberating political space in which knowledges and identities can be contested and negotiated. The book sets out to problematize the concept of race, examine the present articulation and possible rearticulations of race within educational institutions, and finally, to advance strategic interventions into the production of racial identities and knowledges. This purpose is reflected in the volume's three sections: "The Problem of Race," "Contradictions of Existence: The Production of Racial Inequality in Schooling," and "Cultural Interventions in Race Relations in School and Society."
Drawing on current work in...