FACULTY FORUM

Monmouth College

Monmouth IL 61462

Vol. 11

(March 2006)

Faculty Editorial Board

William Urban and Steven Price

THE MONMOUTH COLLEGE FACULTY FORUM was established in June of 1963 by Dean Harry S.

Manley to "provide a means through which selected scholarly papers written by Monmouth College faculty would

be given a wider distribution." The source of papers was the faculty colloquium series, a program in which each

month one faculty member presented a report on recent research and reflection. Manley wrote:

The college underwrites this publication out of a conviction that it will:

1. Encourage members of the faculty to pursue their research interests and thereby stimulate scholarship and

faculty growth.

2. Enhance the interest of advanced students in scholarly writing and research.

3. Give the faculty a format for confrontation with their peers.

4. Support our academic policy that competent teaching requires continuing research by the teacher.

After a lapse of some years, publication of the series was resumed in 1991. In the spring of 1993 the Faculty

and Institutional Development Committee recommended local distribution in electronic form with only a few

printed copies for authors and institutional use.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

How To Publish

By William Urban

    I would not have written this essay a few years ago. But circumstances have changed. As of November,

2004, when I spoke to this topic in a colloquium, most members of the college faculty were new, and it is important

that they and their successors recognize artifacts of our institutional history when they encounter them. In writing

this now, I hope that some of the attitudes I describe are artifacts, and therefore rare. And I hope that everyone

    It used to be said, certainly from the Seventies well into the Nineties, that one could not publish at

Monmouth College. The teaching load was too heavy, there were no examples of excellence on campus, there was

too little administrative help, and the library was inadequate.

    This was never completely true. If it had been, the faculty would have been totally unproductive. There was

something to the complaint, of course. But I believe that on the whole this statement was based on what some might

call selective self-referential reification.

    It was true that in the more distant past, more than thirty years ago, each instructor taught more classes than

today, eight (except Bernice Fox, who offered more for her Latin majors), and most were larger in size (except

Bernice Fox’s), often forty students or more. Twenty years ago there were still eight classes but much smaller ones.

But in either epoch there was more free time. There were no emails, no internet, and often no telephone. Fewer

distractions. Also fewer term papers, because reading the handwriting was just too difficult. Faculty just had more

leisure time. Some used this time to write.

    Professors were publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. Not Haldeman, perhaps, who was a great producer of

chemists who did publish. But there was Garvin Davenport in history (the successor of Lynn Turner_who was

president of Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society, which named its most prestigious prize for him),

Albert Nicholas and Charles Wingo in education, Dorothy Donald in language (honored by France for her service),

Sam Thompson in philosophy, Charles Speel in religious studies, and many others.

    In 1961 the faculty began a practice of giving talks for colleagues. In 1963 Dean Manley established the

fate is at the heart of my story.

    Administrative efforts to encourage publication included introducing a Sabbatical program at a time when

Sabbaticals were not universal. And few colleges had as generous a program as the one introduced by Dean Amy,

one term in ten off. Since Monmouth College had three terms a year, that meant a three month Sabbatical every 3

1/3 years. President DeBow Freed tried very hard to honor those who published, establishing cash awards and an

award banquet for three categories of faculty achievement—teaching, publication and service. There were always

travel grants and money for research, and several of my early books were published only because they were given

received assistance from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, and when that organization asked

committee service.

    Interlibrary loan was always available. It was more primitive in those days, but if the librarians had any

chance at all of getting my books, they did so. They always joked about my never ordering anything in English.

In spite of this a severe morale problem developed in the Seventies that lasted until recently. In part this

reflected negative national employment trends. The number of students attending college had increased dramatically

in the Sixties, partly thanks to Sputnik-inspired grants for science and foreign languages. Monmouth had benefited

from both the growth and the grants. But the introduction of the junior college system and the explosive increase in

the number and size of the state universities put a pressure on private liberal arts colleges at a moment when

graduate schools were turning out more Ph.D.s than could be employed. Hiring and tenure committees,

overwhelmed by the number of applicants for employment and retention, gave up the effort to evaluate teaching and

began to look almost exclusively at publication records. This also reflected a desire for status based on faculty

scholarship; “weighing” accomplishments became more literal than symbolic. And, perhaps, administrators realized

that professors who were staying up late nights writing that next book for promotion would not be interfering with

the smooth operation of the university. Whatever the reasons, the energy crisis and the end of the draft in the early

Seventies gave an additional push to an already discernible decline in enrollments and grants. This at the very

moment that costs were increasing dramatically. When the trustees announced that the budget had to be balanced,

even if it meant cutting back an oversized faculty, there was a reaction close to panic. Monmouth College’s survival

was not certain, and the employability of its faculty was in doubt, too.

to cut friends and colleagues. Never. Ever.

    The generally low morale created by the combination of terminal contracts and minimal raises was

exasperated by the frustration at realizing that the job market now emphasized publications. Some said that the

college was to blame for their not having published—too heavy a load, no administration support, no library.

The reaction to this was mixed. Most faculty members were supportive of colleagues who published, but

there was some resentment. There were hurtful comments, and ours is a thin-skinned profession. Slights that should

have been considered, well, only slightly, became barriers to personal interactions. Factions developed, and the fads

of the Nineties only made the situation worse. Old-fashioned scholarship did not count for much, certainly not as

much “cutting edge” subjects. Traditionalists countered that the profusion of new journals made it possible for

almost anyone to get something in print and that many editors preferred jargon-ridden essays for narrow audiences

rather than the kind of writing that would benefit students and the general public. The result was a generation gap

that did not disappear when the GI Bill generation retired. The elimination of the recognition awards about 1992, on

the grounds that feelings were being hurt, was probably the low point. The message seemed clear: Don’t try to do

anything outstanding. It was later articulated as “we are all working hard, and we are all doing a good job.”

Honest people could disagree over that. And did.

Monmouth College: the load was too high, the students too average. Some faculty members were demanding a

significant increase in the ACT average, no matter what this did to recruiting efforts. Others voiced great concern for

the poor and underprivileged, and racial minorities, no matter that their ACTs were generally lower. Gender was

often expressed as a problem, but less so because the trend in enrollment was toward more women (and higher

ACTs). Claims that there was an imbalance on the faculty was balanced against a head count which revealed—no

surprise—that older faculty were overwhelming male. But younger faculty were almost 50-50, and that Monmouth

was much more balanced than other ACM schools. There were occasional suggestions that, because of past

discrimination, women should not be required to meet the standards of male faculty. This was not appreciated by

female professors who had managed to publish. There were even arguments that there had to be special classes for

the best students, taught by the best faculty, and, naturally, these had to be smaller classes. One had to be among ‘the

best faculty’ not to realize what their colleagues thought of that. In short, this was not the faculty’s finest moment.

    That generation is passing, or at least maturing, and the fads are passing, too. This process had already

began to end when Dick Giese became president in 1997. Three-quarters of the 2004 faculty were ‘Giese kids’, men

and women who have come since then. He deserves much credit for this, most importantly in the growth of the

student body, the increase in salaries, and the new buildings, but there were also changing national trends and

improvements in technology. At one of Giese’s first faculty meetings, the internet was made available to the faculty.

That surprising development, which no one had foreseen coming so quickly, changed our access to the outside

world. Professors who were familiar with the technology and had been waiting impatiently to use it, had their

websites up the very next day.

want to publish, you can do it. If you don’t want to, you probably won’t. I wouldn’t want to require anyone to have

    It is also relatively unimportant what one writes. I have been criticized by medievalists for writing narrative

histories, the type non-professionals read. Real scholarship, I have been informed, is produced in monographs. The

thicker and duller, the better. But that’s what I love about those who preach individualism—the herd instinct.

As for teaching, my dissertation advisor, Archie Lewis, always got a standing ovation on the last lecture of

each class. A good model, I always thought. (I don’t remember anyone else at the University of Texas being so

honored.) I’ve never gotten a standing ovation myself, but once when I was a guest lecturer at the University of

Kansas a student came up and said, “I couldn’t figure out at first why you and Professor Nelson are so much alike.

Then I remembered that you are both students of Archie Lewis.” I prefer to think that that was a compliment.

That’s why Archie’s picture hangs in my office. He was a teacher, scholar and gentleman. I should have

consulted him more often. When I first came to Monmouth College, I was asked to undertake college

responsibilities that required more wisdom and experience than I had; I did not have enough wisdom and experience

to refuse.

    In the end, my colleagues either forgave me or didn’t notice. They gave me the first Burlington Northern

Award for Teaching Excellence, with a cash award sufficient for me, together with a German government research

grant and a Sabbatical, to take Jackie and our three children to Germany for the summer and fall. I have enjoyed

taking on new tasks, going from serious histories to philosophies of history, to middle school history, to plays and,

more recently, to murder mysteries. I do not think I could have done that at a research institution. I would have been

confined to writing monographs. Well, maybe by now I could write murder mysteries. If I had survived the tenure

process despite not having published immediately, I now would be a quaint old fellow, an artifact of the bad old

days, and therefore allowed to do what I wanted until I took my silver-plated retirement gift and vanished.

    I did not write the articles and books because I had to. Lord knows, it wasn’t for the money, either. But

people just kept asking when the next publication would be out. There wasn’t any money connected to the Lee L.

Morgan chair, either, or for the years of coaching, or helping ZBT get off the ground. But sometimes one is uniquely

qualified to do a job. Perhaps only marginally qualified, but nobody else will do it. The old-fashioned name for this

is a ‘calling’. It is an appropriate term for Presbyterian education, even in a college like Monmouth, where the

church has moved away from the college as much as the college has backed away from the church.

    I was not a better scholar or teacher than many others here. Just ask around. But I understood better than

At research universities professors stay up late at night to write. Although they have relatively low teaching loads,

the time put into research far exceeds any saved from having fewer hours in the classroom and grading exams.

When I was first learning my trade, my days seemed overfilled. Each course was new. It was not until I had

taught each multiple times that I did not have to work evenings on class preparations. No mentor was available, but

my colleagues were very supportive. I have much to thank Doug Spitz and Mary Crow for.

I had them down pat. As chair I remember well some confrontations with a former dean over his efforts to get

With experience, new courses become less daunting. Also, if new courses are built on individual strengths, they will

not exhaust the instructor. New preps should provide insights and stimulate thinking.

the University of Kansas. I wrote, she typed. She proofread until computers and spell check came in. Family

members have to understand that when the writer is hunched over the typewriter or computer, that any interruption

should be important. Fire comes to mind. Or children’s problems.

willingly packed up the children to live in Italy for a year, then Germany, then back to Germany and back again.

Then to Yugoslavia and the Czech Republic. And endured my frequent absences during much of many summers.

Sabbatical in my thirteenth year.

    Sometimes research cannot even get started until new skills have been mastered. For years I used lunch

time to work on medieval Latin; in 1973 I went to Poland to study the language; I went to Beloit College two

summers to recover my lost Russian; I talked the dean into allowing me to teach Intensive Italian three times as an

overload. Returning to Germany regularly kept that language alive, and visiting family in Texas was a constant

opportunity to keep the Spanish from turning completely into Italian. I was less able to work on my Slavic

languages. Alas. But life is short and eventually one has to stop preparing and start working.

4 AM. (I wrote the first draft of this talk at 3 AM.) If you are thinking about something, you will dream about it or

think about it. Rather than toss and turn, get up and write it down.

    Come to work early. I used to come at six to use the college’s first computer; I now come at seven. Use

lunchtimes effectively. Give up prime time TV (not much lost there anyway). Work on weekends. Work during the

summer. Write, write, write.

several translations from Middle High German into colloquial English, and deepened my knowledge of the sources

considerably.

    I’ve been asked how to make time. These are my suggestions: First, marry the right person; second, give up

competing passions. I used to play chess well. That was very time consuming and, even worse, stressful—I would

replay the games in my head all night. I also enjoyed playing tennis, but getting better required playing more

regularly than I could manage; third, refuse entreaties to take on responsibilities. Men’s clubs, for example, take

only an hour or two a week, but that is equal to a full work week each year. Administrative tasks should be limited.

Becoming a dean is deadly to scholarship, because administrative paperwork is too much like research and too

stressful. Lastly, develop a schedule. One of my history colleagues thirty years ago was not finishing his

dissertation. His wife practically locked him in the house except to meet his classes; she turned down all social

invitations until he was finished.

    How can one keep fresh? First, make diversions truly diverting. Totally different from research and writing.

Physical activity is almost a necessity. I coached soccer for years. It was nothing like library work. Gardening,

which for many years was little more than mowing the lawn, has been very enjoyable—and it lends itself to Books

on Tape. Biking is great fun, but Books on Tape are far too dangerous on the road.

places to work there. One place for grubbing the footnotes, another for the rough first draft, another for corrections. I

enclosed the front porch to make a marvelous solarium.

    S tart writing right away. Often you can only see what you need to do when it’s on paper. You can throw

away what is bad. Throw away even what is mediocre.

    Learn to write well. That’s not easy. Since editing student papers is good practice, a heavy work load is not

all bad. Apply the same standards to your own work: find a strong topic sentence, cut back on wordiness, eliminate

flourishes; strike out most words ending in –ly and most adjectives. Read Mark Twain’s advice on writing. Follow

that I was not a good writer when I came to Monmouth, but I had become one. That was high praise. Bernice had

very high standards.

    Write on diverse subjects. Newspaper columns and book reviews are good practice, and they are diversions

from wearying research projects that seem to have no end.

    Make time for family. Jackie and I went camping, hiking. The kids hated it; now they do it themselves.

Children’s activities make tourism more interesting (there are only so many museums one can stand in any given

day). This was especially important during my teaching and research stints abroad; there was nothing like a hike up

to a castle to combine family, exercise and research interests. Time with relatives was important for us all. Two to

three times a year we packed children and pets into the car for the eleven hour drive to north central Kansas.

How do you get ideas? That’s a question I get occasionally, but usually it comes in the form of  “All the

good research topics have been done.” I could not disagree more, though it is obvious that all the obvious topics

have been worked on. Get off the beaten track. Become an expert in something that is not a current fad. I started in

Baltic history when nobody was interested in it. I now turn down offers for talks and chapters and books (I always

answer letters and email from graduate students or even just enthusiastic undergraduates). Just as today’s fad will

become out of date, what seems unimportant now may become tomorrow’s hot subject.

    Teaching at Monmouth gets one out of any narrow specialty. Anyone with a few years of experience will

smile at this. No graduate school training prepares for the variety of classes we have to offer.

    Read widely. The best ideas are not in your specialty. Hang out with people in other departments. Hang out

with interesting people. That is, unconventional people, people who do not always agree with you. Doug Spitz never

failed to provide a good conversation; he never seemed to sleep, and there was no important book that he hadn’t

read. Hang out with productive people. If they have time to hang out with you.

    Avoid too much alcohol, and people who abuse it. Alcohol wipes out many a promising scholar.

(Marijuana probably too. Although I understand it is less damaging to health and not fattening.) Avoid anything that

could get you more reading time at state expense than you really want.

    Avoid bad trips, but travel. Not just as a tourist, but live in some new place for weeks or months. Attend

conferences, but listen to papers on topics you don’t know anything about.

    Don’t get carried away by politics, either national or campus. I once asked Archie Lewis, probably about

1963, a year filled with explosive issues, why he wasn’t active in university politics. He said that one couldn’t be a

Too much stress and too much time. Do have political opinions, do get involved. But use common sense. Establish

your priorities. And combine your interests. If saving whales is your passion, write about whales. Move to Puget

Sound.

everywhere. Jealousy and conspiracies have existed on campuses since the Middle Ages, and they won’t go away.

Remember that publishing a popular book or winning a teaching award is the kiss of death at many major

universities.

    There are those who would distract you. Most mean well. Don’t forget that most distractions are

worthwhile in themselves. They may be more valuable than publishing.

But you were young then. As you mature, you will likely discover that much you were told in graduate school is

wrong.

    Teaching well may be more significant than writing for a handful of peers. That is nothing to be ashamed

of! If teaching turns you on, teach. If it doesn’t, look for another job. But if you are driven to write, do it!

Start anywhere. A discussion board is good practice. But don’t let such activities take on too great a role in

your life. Stay focused. Then move on.

for promotion or tenure. These articles would serve as benchmarks of what each generation of scholars does. The

writer might even learn that writing for a general audience is enjoyable. Our present requirement of giving a talk is

outdated because so many of us cannot find the time to attend all of them—the teaching staff has grown too large.

Rather than speak to a handful of people, something most of us can do with minimal preparation, each candidate

could write five to ten good pages in understandable prose on something important and interesting. Something each

is willing to be judged on for years to come.

    But everything in life requires risks.

    Publishing means choosing among the various risks.

    Then pursuing the goal.

The Critic in the College Community

By Craig Vivian

George Byron

What has ever been produced, created, or imagined that has not also been questioned by critics? To be

critical seems to be a fundamental part of human nature. There have always been critics, and they have been

perceived differently by those around them. Some are praised, some are tolerated, and some are killed. What role

can or should critics play in academic institutions, and how ought liberal arts colleges to respond to the critics within

their midst? This paper will argue that critics are essential to the dynamism of institutions of higher education;

however, because of the encroachment of a corporate mentality into institutional development, critics are an

endangered species on college campuses. The critic, ideally, provides the antithetical impetus needed to challenge

and change the institution. In order to provoke change, a critic must have access to public spaces within the

institution, but corporations, by their nature, restrict public space. As academic institutions shift toward

corporatism, public space diminishes, and so too does the contribution of the critic to intellectual and institutional

progress.

The critic serves a political and social purpose. Whereas the art critic serves as a judge or connoisseur, and

the social critic serves to offer insights into the forces that govern us, it is the academic critic who serves to analyze

the institutions and disciplines that produce and pass on knowledge, as well as the knowledge itself. The production

of art would continue without the presence of art critics, because every artist, simply through his or her work, acts as

an art critic by challenging the existing body of art with the creation of more art. However, the contributions of

people dedicated to art criticism also lead to an advancement of art by stimulating discussion and reaction.

Similarly, in the absence of critics within academic institutions, scholars would continue to produce knowledge and

serve as critics through their contributions to knowledge. Institutional critics, however, facilitate this process: by

offering an antithesis to a thesis, they stimulate the community’s efforts to achieve a synthesis, or advancement.

This process is as crucial for institutional development as it is for the evolution of knowledge.

James Downey (1995) has described the university as a trinity: an admixture of corporation, collegium, and

community. He argues that this composition is a recent development, brought about by technological, economic,

and political changes. This description applies, in some degree, to all institutions of higher education and becomes

important in understanding the tensions on campuses relating to differing reactions to social and political issues by

various constituents. According to Downey, the corporate dimension of a college is of a “hierarchical structure,

with authority vested in a corporate board and delegated to designated officers. [It] cannot afford to operate as a

consensual community…[it] doesn’t have colleagues; it has officers, employees, and clients, and for its own

integrity it must deal with them as such (p.3). This hierarchy is seen as necessary to the orderly running of the

institution, and therefore as an essential component of it. What becomes problematic for institutions of higher

education is that corporations do not have public space in which to accommodate critical voices. In a hierarchy,

critics are generally seen as subversive, destructive, divisive, and disloyal. Simply stated, there are no critics in a

corporation. Although there may be room for “input” from outsiders in a corporation, this is business that takes

place in a “private sphere” and not in public.

If the corporate component of the trinity becomes central to the academic institution, private spheres

become primary in planning development and growth, as well as academic direction and initiatives. Private spheres

are housed within existing power structures and operate to promote private vision and self-interests. Under a

hierarchical structure, group-think primarily dominates private interactions: little innovation occurs and a limited

number of perspectives are examined. If a corporate structure, and its procedures, comes to dominate an institution,

public spaces are transformed: instead of existing as active and critical forums of communication and participation,

they are reduced to spaces where those in the collegium perform perfunctory “business” transactions devoid of

democratic interaction. The corporate component does not easily tolerate critical public spaces, because

corporations must work under the assumption that the institution is functioning correctly so as to preserve

confidence in the institution. Corporations must claim some degree of foundational validity in their operations, but

critics, by their nature, do not accept an absolute or imagined truth: they are continually examining and contesting

ideas— striving for better approaches or answers. A corporation, to maintain order, must at least pretend that it has

the right answers and goals, and cannot give a public impression that it is constantly questioning its goals, or

publicly searching for a better mission.

Critical public spaces are defined, in this essay, as areas where public discourse is unconstrained and all

ideas are publicly questioned, examined, or challenged by the members of the community. If a college community

is to flourish, students, as well as faculty and administrators, need to be able to take seriously different points of

Accordingly, “those who claim the right to criticize should assume the responsibility to comprehend others”

(Williamsburg Charter, 1986, p.6). Public spaces are civic arenas which are an integral part of the institution and

therefore viewed as positive communal spaces where one goes to participate in reasoned critical discussions of

important public matters. These spaces are not “pseudo” public spaces full of competing propagandas and private

ideologies aimed at distorting or selling a perspective. These spaces are also not philosophically equivalent to the

open market. Public critics are not as interested in developing a shared conception of Truth as much as they are

interested in the “personal challenge of assuming personal responsibility for finding their own will to meaning”

(Lakeland, 1993).

If the public spaces of an academic institution wither away, how will the institution function? One result

could be an institutional vacuum where meaningful public responses to political and social issues do not

exist—where no public reactions to political and social events are visible. They become socially or politically

“dead” communities in spite of any erudition or thinking taking place in the classroom. It seems reasonable to

suggest that “living” communities only survive in the presence of public spaces, for it is in public spaces that people

come together to speak and act—to publicly craft a vision. Although there have been many conceptualizations of

public space, Aristotle’s insights have continued to inform those who have seriously looked at the significance of

public and private spheres. When Aristotle studied the activities required to be a part of human communal life, he

found two: action and speech. He believed that from these activities there emerges the political and social

foundations of human affairs. When action and speech occur within a public sphere, common ground is created

where people are seen and heard as “equals,” and this space becomes the location where they can critique, judge,

discuss and advance a common and shared understanding of the good. In other words, the public use of space will

be political/social in nature. Hannah Arendt captures well how the critical aspect of thinking depends on the

attributes of a public space:

the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure

reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am

quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others [which results in

an] enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its individual

limitations, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose

place” it must think, whose perspective it must take into consideration, and without whom it never

has the opportunity to operate at all. (1961, p. 220-1)

In other words, a critical mind is formed by association with other critical minds and will indeed benefit by

having public spaces in which to operate. In order to accommodate the critic, and critical thinking, certain public

spaces must be established which lend themselves to critical exchanges that promote questioning, probing, and

dissension. These public spaces also serve to ensure that a healthy balance is maintained between the three

components of the institution.

Democracy and freedom have always been associated with a conception of public space, and in her paper,

particular strain of political thought: Benhabib first examines Arendt’s view of public space as being

“associational”—a view that public space emerges whenever groups of people come together and act in concert.

According to Arendt, these public spaces become “sites of power, of common action coordinated through speech

and persuasion” (ibid p.93). Benhabib criticizes this conceptualization for focusing primarily on agendas and

activities. If the critic is to locate herself in higher education, then the institution must have legitimate public spaces

devoted to “reflexive questioning of issues by all those affected…and the recognition of their right to do so” (ibid

p.95). Accordingly, public space must not be used solely for demonstrations of power or protests, as there is a lack

of dialogue and a proclivity to violence or force.

Benhabib presents a second view of public space based upon the work of Bruce Ackerman, a proponent of

fundamentally disagree, thereby allowing members of those groups to “resolve problems of coexistence in a

reasonable way” (ibid p.96). Ackerman imagines public space, restricted in this manner, will be used to enhance

public conversations, but performed in accordance with a certain procedure:

When you and I learn that we disagree about one or another dimension of the moral truth . . . we

should simply say nothing at all about this disagreement and try to solve our problem by invoking

premises we do agree upon. In restraining ourselves in this way, we do not lose the chance to talk

to one another about our deepest moral disagreements in countless other, more private, contexts.

(ibid p.98)

This consensus building approach is commendable, but does little to engender the unanticipated insights

that occur during a critical discussion of issues by those who agree that their disagreements are worth talking about.

A problem with Ackerman’s approach is that public spaces are most useful when they become the sites where

contested issues are critically examined and where discussions are publicly evaluated.

Benhabib offers a third conceptualization of public space based upon the work of Jurgen Habermas and

referred to as a discursive model; a critical-participatory environment giving opportunities for all voices to be heard

and a commitment to legitimating society and tradition by developing “individuals who are increasingly more

dependent on critical and reflexive attitudes” (ibid p.104). This conceptualization implies institutional support for

full participation of all its members in the issues which they see as relevant. For universal participation to occur, it

requires that a common space is maintained in which members are allowed to meet through different media, and in

various arenas—print, electronic, and face to face encounters—all taking place within the institution, but none under

the influence of the institution. This type of participation will be “messy,” and, according to Charles Taylor, within

this public space there is an “ever-continuing controversy . . . [whose] potentially divisive and destructive

to define the common good” (1995 p.192). As argued previously, it seems impossible for a truly inclusive common

good to be created within a corporate structure that privileges private space and eschews public spaces and divergent

perspectives.

It is therefore incumbent upon academic institutions to give space and voice to the critic to counter the

conforming aspects of the corporate element within higher education, and to sustain the critically reflective tradition

of inquiry among faculty and students. If public spaces in academia disappear, the critic will be relegated to the role

of a complainer: one whose words and ideas are never given public exposure, legitimacy, or acknowledgement. A

key difference between oppositional and alienated individuals (complainers) and committed, activist, and reflective

members of a community (critics) is that the former are denied access to a public space. It is the critic, and the

public embracing of critical voices, that will lead to dialectical progress, since it is through public debate and critical

interchange that the institution will democratically and freely revise and re-form itself. These changes will be the

result of critical exchanges over the values, goals and communal issues that make their way into the public spaces.

It is also the case that these exchanges will allow the faculty and student body to legitimate and delineate knowledge

claims and intellectual foci.

An institution that makes no effort to preserve public space will be replete with alienated, apathetic, or

powerless individuals. Evidence of a lack of public space on campuses will be a faculty that does not model the

pursuit of justice, wisdom, and inquiry as citizens, and a passive student body. It does not suffice to be critical only

in the classroom, as that can only remain an academic exercise, regardless of its intent or the power contained in its

instruction. The academy must preserve and even augment public space since it is there, through critical discourse,

that the common “good” can be formed and developed, for “at its root, criticism is always moral in character”

(Walzer, 1988, p.9)—and it is a public critic with a sincere interest in furthering public discourse, and not the

individualistic complainer, who works to change conditions for the better.

References

NY,1961).

Winter 1993, v.43, issue 4 pp.488-503.

(Charlottesville, UPV, 1995).

How Do Girls Define Resistance and What Would They Resist?

Implications for Critical Pedagogy

By Monie Hayes

Our children are going to hell, and Hollywood, in a handbasket. At the same time, our girl children are

traveling their own road to perdition, one paved with good intentions—good, that is, where prevalent discourses of

femininity conflate “goodness” with self-abnegation while common cultural representations of women and girls

continue to objectify, diminish, and constrain us. The preceding statements summarize, respectively, much of the

current thought about kids’ relationship to popular culture and much of the recent scholarship about growing up and

assuming a gendered identity in contemporary Western culture. Not surprisingly, adults want to steer youngsters off

these paths. But the prevailing conventional and scholarly wisdom about kids in trouble, while it seems to grow

from an ethos of care about kids, casts both youth and gender as problems to be solved, realms of peril instead of

possibility. It further casts adults who would intervene in these dynamics as advocates for kids, here girls in

particular, in a didactic role, reading from a “We know what’s good for you” script. Moreover, such opinions often

are put forth as if viewing, listening, or logging on were somehow context-free, with little regard to the social

dynamics that inform viewing and response, and certainly color kids’ authorship of media messages.

One important strand of scholarship during the previous decade has, however, considered the ways in

which girls, as situated audiences, take up popular media, and the ways in which publications marketed to

adolescent girls position them to reproduce patriarchal, “lookist,” and consumerist personas and practices. Spurred

have identified girls as at risk in particular ways in our schools and larger Western culture, especially as they enter

adolescence (American Association of University Women, 1992, 1999; Debold, 2001; Finders, 1997; Gilligan,

1993; Girl Scouts of the USA, 2000; Orenstein, 1994; Pipher, 1994; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). A branch of this

inquiry has considered girls’ literate practices, in particular the ways in which they respond and are positioned with

regard to popular genres (Cherland, 1994; Christian-Smith, 1993; B. Davies, 1993a; Enciso, 1998; Finders, 1997;

Gilbert and Taylor, 1991; Trachsel, 1998; Willinsky & Hunniford, 1993). These scholars find that such narrative

forms as horror films, horse stories, teen romances, and teen ‘zines operate as little more than primers for patriarchy,

serving to reinscribe middle-class morés of “ladylike” gentility as inextricably bound to happy endings.

Where kids are being sold a shoddy “identity kit” (Gee, 1987), it is, of course, proper to intervene and

invite them to interrogate messages that position them in delimiting ways as, for example, the man of action, the

“perfect” girl, or the savvy consumer. It is also appropriate to work with kids to confront the gender and class

inequity that popular media genres often reflect. But as literacy scholars, it is likewise appropriate that we

interrogate the assumptions, including our own, surrounding the phenomena of response as well as those implicit

within the electronic messages that increasingly are a part of our children’s lives, and that we turn our energies

toward considering all that these representations might mean to the young people who view and listen to them, often

with enthusiasm and sometimes with disdain. This is what I sought to do in my dissertation research, and I excerpted

indicates a rhetorical-political stance with regard to adolescent audiences’ extant savvy and a penchant for wordplay

since my research informants were members of a Girl Scout troop. I recount and consider one aspect of my

findings, which inform the title of this piece.

My findings underscore my conviction that an authentic apprehension of children’s relationships to media

is vital to developing a sound and substantive grounded theoretical base to support critical media literacy instruction.

Developing such insight is especially vital because media literacy pedagogy is gaining a stronghold among

education practitioners and scholars. In the 1990s, for instance, both the International Reading Association and

National Council of Teachers of English included media literacy among their literacy standards. In 1999, Girl Scouts

of the USA introduced its own critical media literacy program, Media Know-How, whose uptake I chronicled in two

group settings, including the focal troop whose implementation of the program this article reports. Any

understanding of girls’ relationship to media must extend beyond consideration of particular young people’s habits

and assumptions with regard to media to include an accounting for their relationships to their social worlds and the

cultural context in which any text or image, and the ideology it naturalizes or interrogates, circulates. This can offer

insight not only into how various textual messages mean for kids, but additionally, into why they are fraught. Taking

this approach can surprise us, but it can both complicate and inform our work with adolescents toward fostering

critical media literacy—and critical cultural literacy—in productive ways.

Again, many approaches to gender, adolescence, popular media and culture, and literacy learning itself

seemed based on the notion that there is a problem to be fixed and little recognition of the resources at

hand—namely, the young people we are ostensibly trying to “help.” What social and intellectual resources do they

bring to viewership, authorship, and response? What resources do they want to develop? A research stance that

considers their central role as participants in media literacy learning, production, and response can yield answers to

these questions. To generate a portrait of one critical literacy program and its mobilization by a specific group of

learners, I turned to the Girl Scouts of the USA and one adolescent troop’s implementation of the organization’s

Media Know-How program (Cryan/GSUSA, 1999).

I sought an adolescent troop, and was able to negotiate entry to observe one group of fifth and sixth graders

as well as the ninth and tenth graders who became my focal subjects, because of the pressures that accompany the

inculcation of gender at adolescence (Gilligan, 1993; et al. as listed above). This work alerts or reminds adults who

grew up in the era of “women’s liberation” that the notion that the girls they are raising and teaching are growing up

in a post-feminist culture is a myth in the discursive service of ongoing male privilege, veiled in genteel admonitions

not to make waves.

discusses the ways femininity is defined by contradiction and limitation and the consequences of the processes of

subjectification that girls undergo:

Girls have long been trained to be feminine at considerable cost to their humanity. They have long

been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too

much; be polite, but be yourself; be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but

don’t comment on the sexism. Another way to describe this femininity training is to call it false

self-training. Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the

culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become. (44)

Thus the discursive norms of ideal femininity are at odds with each other in frustrating and delimiting

ways. Pipher is apt to remark the arbitrary and constraining ways that social discursive norms of gender can inhibit

girls, but her observations suffer the conceptual shortcoming of presenting restrictive cultural norms in opposition to

an idealized notion of the self, in particular as it is experienced in a romanticized childhood. I would argue that the

term “false self-training” most accurately conveys that the options girls face for enacting gender are narrow and thus

prohibit certain ways of performing one’s subjectivity in socially sanctioned ways. If girls’ felt motives fall outside

the recognized standard for “doing girl,” girls might not act upon them—or might face consequences for so doing.

What is false is what is not full. The fault of cultural standards for the performance of gendered identity is not that

they operate to sever girls from their previously fixed and authentic selves but that they work to constrict the

repertoire.

Pipher is not the only feminist scholar to illustrate that the rules for enacting gender are contradictory in

ways that give girls coming of age in Western culture few satisfying options or to point out that social standards can

seem at odds with what girls understand to be their own motivations. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, who participated

in the 1992 AAUW research, explains that girls are especially vulnerable to feelings of loss and consequent anger as

they enter adolescence, when the inculcation of femininity intensifies. Reporting the findings of a study of

adolescent girls, Gilligan (1993) describes the process as one of psychic tumult and struggle precisely because it is

not natural. Gilligan’s findings echo Pipher’s claim that girls are caught in a web of cultural paradox where they are

led to be “good,” “nice” girls in a social world that is not always good and nice, in particular to them. Girls, who

prize caring and are judged by how caring they appear (Gilligan, 1982/1993, 1993; Nilan, 1991), learn that if they

don’t have anything nice to say, then they shouldn’t say anything at all. But they do so at great psychic cost, for in

order to maintain approval and interpersonal connection, they learn to behave in socially constructed “feminine”

ways that feel as artificial as they are.

One of the most pernicious cultural myths is that of the perfect girl. The omnipresence of this impossibleto-

emulate role model holds girls to “a standard that does not come out of their experience and an image that,

because embodied, calls into question the reality that they have lived in” (Gilligan, 1993, p. 158). In addition to

inculcating acquiescence, then, social norms of femininity inculcate self-doubt as girls approach and move through

adolescence. Gilligan describes the impact of such recurrent narrative and social tropes as perfect girls and

swaggering heroes upon the actual girls growing up in a patriarchal culture beholden to such myths. According to

Gilligan, girls discover that they are at risk:

if they continue to know what they know, and especially if they say it in public. What once

seemed ordinary to girls – speaking, difference, anger, conflict, fighting, bad as well as good

thoughts and feelings, now seem treacherous: laced with danger, a sign of imperfection, a

Where prevalent discourses of gender define femininity against a standard of consideration for the comfort

of others over one’s own, a recalcitrant girl risks not only correction but ostracism. The girl who dares to speak her

mind, to voice her perceptions—to “comment on the sexism”—risks being defined as different and socially rejected,

a particularly deterrent consequence for adolescents and especially harsh discipline for girls, given Gilligan’s earlier

observations (1982/1993) that girls are inculcated into an ethos of care; they come to construct their identities and

weigh their value and importance in the social world in terms of their relationships to others.

Gilligan identifies what adolescent girls thus experience as “the central dilemma of relationship: how to

speak honestly and also stay in connection with others” (1993, p. 150). In order to be “good,” and thus maintain

approval from significant others, girls must deal with those others less openly.

Girls’ accounts of the social practices of teen femininity indicate that assuming and enacting a gendered

with its participant suggestions for cultural, attitudinal, and school reform, demonstrates that feminism is not an

adult-down project. The project, in which GSUSA was one of a handful of national partners, was undertaken to

include girls’ perspectives in research and advocacy undertaken on their behalf. It represents a deliberate attempt to

bring girls’ voices into discussions of the problems they face and the solutions they imagine—and to take them

seriously. The case study reported in this thesis represents a similarly informed, more longitudinal effort on a

smaller participant scale.

which girls were invited to discuss their experiences and list issues that concern them as adolescent girls along with

the changes they’d like to see in their social environment; specifically, AAUW researchers coded preliminary

questionnaires completed by 730 girls, roughly one-third of the participant pool. The findings of the AAUW’s 1999

follow-up to the earlier study reveal that today’s schoolgirls remain oppressed and inhibited by a school culture

which values them according to their looks and marginalizes those who do not meet the accepted standard. The

findings confirm that it is not easy being an adolescent girl and that girls want support in meeting and negotiating

the social challenges they face. This includes a stated desire among pre-adolescent and adolescent respondents for a

discursive space where they might talk about the issues that concern them.

Most of the eleven- to seventeen-year-old girls invited to discuss their experiences reported sexual pressure

p. 3). Most name harassment as something they wish they could change about their schools. Yet many report having

taken part as well as having been a victim; this not only reveals the extent of sexual harassment in schools, but

demonstrates the fluidity of subject position and participant structure, specifically among adolescent social practices.

policing will be related to the performance of one’s sexual or gendered identity.

Summit participants named teen pregnancy more than any other issue as “the ‘major issue’ or struggle in

frequently than White and Asian-American girls. (Sixty-two percent of Latino girls, fifty-seven percent of Black

girls, thirty-one percent of Native American girls, twenty-one percent of White girls, and nineteen percent of the

Asian-American girls who completed a questionnaire named pregnancy as one of the most important issues or

struggles facing teen girls.) Moreover, girls’ characterization of sexuality as perilous extended beyond a cause-andeffect

appreciation of the risk of pregnancy; their depiction of the experience of sexuality was embedded in a

discourse of coercion along a continuum that ranged from harassment to assault. Girls reported sexuality as fraught

with social consequences—“a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” social practice that echoes Gilbert and

Taylor’s “slags or drags” discourse of teen femininity. Yet some respondents expressed the desire to be able to

interact with boys as friends, as well as to explore their sexual feelings and curiosity in a safe, respectful

interpersonal context without necessarily proceeding to intercourse. Fine (1993) writes of the missing discourse of

desire in pregnancy-prevention education, an absence that reflects cultural discomfort surrounding and “moral”

condemnation of female sexual appetites. Many feminist educators and scholars, myself included, welcomed her

observations as broadening the standard of wholesomeness. Yet this perspective was not apparent in the AAUW

informants’ responses; the majority of girls seemed to associate sexuality more with pressure than pleasure and did

not seem nearly as ill at ease with the desires they felt as with the social consequences of either avoiding or

exploring sexual activity. They found that boys condemned them as bitches or lesbians for rejecting their overtures,

while girls either branded them sluts for their involvement with boys (whatever form it might take) or labeled them

babies or prudes for abstaining from it. Instead of foregrounding desire, or volition, a discourse of acquiescence

reverberates in girls’ answer to the question, “What is something that someone has said to you that you wish they

hadn’t?” Girls voiced a hesitancy to say no to sexual overtures because they will be—or had been—judged “rude” or

If we wish to extend the choices and mitigate the costs girls encounter, we need to couple our awareness of

discursive dynamics and gender ideology with a consideration of actual girls’ experience, to find out what they

perceive their problems to be. Adults can most productively work with girls to explore their desires, barriers to their

fulfillment, and the consequences of fulfilling or them or not, in our attempts to include girls’ voices in the work of

feminism and determining what form that will take.

Girl Scouts of the USA and Media Know-How

A look at the history of Girl Scouts, in particular a consideration of the organization’s “curriculum,” from

such past programs as a 1969 series of summits and program intended to confront racial prejudice to more recent

programs encouraging girls’ involvement in sports and development of financial and computer savvy, shows the

organization to be at the crest of public and professional awareness about the issues that affect girls’ lived

experience. Thus, observing a focal troop’s uptake of a Girl Scout program seemed a good way to take some girls’

attitudinal pulse, and to consider how institutional agendas meshed with the girls’ motives. I have not doubted since

my original reading of the Media Know-How booklets for Scouts and troop leaders that this program was informed

by an awareness of the exhortations to consumerism and the measuring of oneself against a false physical ideal,

along with the derogation of women some popular lyrics seem to condone—indeed, the booklets explicitly mention

these trends (Cryan/GSUSA, 1999). These elements, along with my own critical concerns and those expressed by

my colleagues, previous research participants, and even my children and their friends, who already at a tenth

birthday sleepover lamented the “girl in jep” formula they recognized in preteen suspense films, led me to expect a

Media Know-How project that interrogated prevalent images of femininity and offered an agentic

alternative—which is in fact what members of the focal troop ultimately produced, though through a text more

closely aligned with the AAUW informants’ voiced concerns about the politics and consequences of sexuality than

with my own prior research informants’ expressed desire for popular cultural representations of feminine personae

that included “an awesome girl kicking rearend” (Hayes, 1999).

Girl Scouts of the USA has a long and varied history that reflects both the social practices it has endeavored

to reproduce and the progressive ideals that have been part of the cultural context the organization has sought to

expand. In this way, according to Halpern, it is similar to many after-school programs:

[T]he after-school field has a rich and interesting tradition . . . After-school programs have defined

themselves in terms of protection, care, opportunity for enrichment, and play while simultaneously

defining themselves in terms of socialization, acculturation, training, and problem remediation.

Providers have argued that program activities should be shaped by children’s interests and

preferences and yet also by what they as adults thought children needed. (2002, p. 179)

Consideration of the history and programs of GSUSA uncovers many of these tensions along with contrasts

between the organization’s present and past social practices. From its liberal roots in opening opportunities for

outdoor excursions—among other more and less traditional activities—to girls without challenging gender divisions

to its overtly collectivist current-day incarnation, the organization itself is a window into overlapping and protean

discourses of gender, youth development, and community. For instance, the organizational slogan is now “Where

girls grow strong” where just a few years ago it was the more individualistic “We grow leaders, one girl at a time”

(http://www.gsusa.org). In an organization with the Girl Scouts’ long history, numerous programs, and diverse

localized program uptake, it is not surprising that accounts of the organization should suggest a wide range of

meaning or experience for girls. Again, the focus of my research was on girls’ interpretations.

GSUSA traces its history to 1912, when the organization was founded by Savannahanian Juliette Gordon

Low. The initial unit included eighteen girls. Low’s organization was a reflection of the British Scouting movement;

in fact, it was modeled after the British Girl Guides, which was in turn an offshoot of the recently organized British

Boy Scouts, founded by Sir Robert Baden-Powell (Jacobson, 1985). In keeping with the ethos of the age (Neil,

1912), Low founded the organization in order to provide wholesome outdoor activities for girls, who customarily

were “cloistered” in their homes (http://www.gsusa.org/ organization/briefhistory.htm). An additional goal of the

program was community service (par. 1). Current program goals include fostering the development of girls’

potential and self-esteem, respect for and cooperation with others, reflective and ethical decision-making, and

contributions to the larger community (http://www.gsusa.org/programs.html).

The organizational structure of GSUSA is one of regional Councils (Iowa, for example, has five; Missouri,

nine) and local troops, several of which might coexist across and within age divisions in any town or city. More than

400 employees currently work at the national headquarters in New York (http://www.gsusa.org/organization/

facts.htm). But despite the full-time national cadre, it is council staff and troop leaders who carry out Scouting

programs at the local level. GSUSA bills itself as the largest voluntary organization for girls, open to all girls ages 5

through 17 (or K-12) “who subscribe to its ideals as stated in the Girl Scout Promise and Law” (p. 2). Today’s

GSUSA troop articulation now comprises Daisy Girl Scouts (Daisy was Juliette Gordon Low’s nickname), ages 5-6

and grades K-1; Brownie Girl Scouts, ages 6-8 and grades 1-3; Junior Girls Scouts, ages 8-11 and grades 3-6;

Cadette Girl Scouts, ages 11-14 and grades 6-9; and Senior Girls Scouts, ages 14-17 and grades 9-12. Daisies joined

GSUSA in the 1980s, while the Junior and Cadette distinction dates to 1963 and the Brownies to 1937 (Jacobson,

1985, p. 31) and represents a bracketing off of young adolescent troops at a time that coincided with a renaissance of

professional interest in the middle school movement (Cuban, 1992). Along with its handbook and initial and

evolving age divisions (e.g., the addition of Brownie troops), the Girl Scouts’ law and oath are traceable to the UK

Boy Scouts’ movement. It has been my experience that some in the academy are skeptical of any Girl Scout troop or

program’s progressive potential, especially given the organization’s roots in colonial nationalism and enduring links

to patriotism. Coke cites Lesko to characterize the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts as agents of youth development in the

service of cultural maintenance (2002, p. 44). Palladino notes that the organization was one of the “character

builders” of the 1920s and ‘30s (1996, p. 18). Walkerdine (1990) finds the organization, with its roots in the British

Scouting movement, reactionary and nationalistic to the point of fascism. I would argue that patriotism is as slippery

a term as any other and that its definition, like all meaning, is locally constructed and contingent. Thus, one person

who hears the term might conjure, say, a John Ashcroft (talk about surprising) while another thinks of current-day

activists for peace. The point is that the social field of the Girl Scouts organization is open and, as its history reveals,

prone to shift. Any of its programs, too, is open to varied local uptake.

Released in 1999, Media Know-How invites girls of varying ages to explore common genres, consider

specific examples of them and, in the case of older girls, create their own game show based on information about the

media (“Media Know-How for Junior Girl Scouts”) or produce their own alternative texts (“Media Know-How for

Cadette and Senior Girl Scouts”). Media Know-How includes a series of booklets for Girl Scouts of different ages,

authored by Rosemarie Cryan, membership and program consultant for GSUSA. The booklet for five- to eight-yearold

Daisy and Brownie Girl Scouts features puzzles, games, and, illustrations intended to introduce terminology.

“Media Know-How for Junior Girl Scouts” features a simulated, read-along game show that introduces media

terminology and describes the history of various media. In addition to reading the script in the booklet, girls may

create and enact their own game shows using information they have gathered from various print and electronic

sources. Twelve- to eighteen-year-old Cadette and Senior Girl Scouts’ booklets contain information that enables

them to design their own magazines, videos, Web pages, and song lyrics. In addition to listing elements of

production (including sound effects and camera angles for video and audience and updates for Web pages) that girls

might consider in authoring original texts, the booklet notes that “Some magazines for girls and women focus too

much on superficial topics rather than ones that appeal to the reader’s intelligence, creativity and ingenuity” and

offer unrealistic visual images of women (Cryan/GSUSA, p. 8).

The tone of each booklet is bright, and each seems written to achieve a balance between admitting pleasure

(in the use as well as the production of media) and questioning stereotypical representations and calls to

consumerism (Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood, 1999; Buckingham, 1993). Zipes (1994) has noted that popular

cultural narratives have been regarded metaphorically as either a mirror or mold of audience values; that is, the

common culture has been subject to folk culture and mass culture interpretations (Hagood, 2001). The Media Know-

How literature seems to take a somewhat more complicated perspective; the language of the booklet for Cadette and

Senior Girl Scouts casts media offerings as a marketplace of experience and ideology and exhorts girls to be

thoughtful shoppers, “‘buying’ only those ideas and opinions with which you are comfortable” (Cryan/GSUSA, p.

5). The program casts media discourse as dialogic and girls as legitimate peripheral participants (Lave & Wenger,

1991) by inviting them to plan and complete their own creative projects in various genres and offering suggestions

for determining what materials they will need for production.

I hoped that observing a group of adolescent Girl Scouts would accommodate my goal of learning more

about the enactment of gender at adolescence, about adolescent girls’ uses for media and for critical media literacy

instruction, and about the social context of a particular outside-school learning community as these various

discursive domains inter-animated one another. I hoped that observing a focal troop and its implementation of

organizational programs would enable me to discover what the girls thought they needed to know and why they

decided what they wanted to say. I wanted to see how a focal group of adolescent girls would or would not use their

participation in this program to address their concerns about the media or craft a message in order to fill a void in the

popular culture and the social practices that constitute both media representations and girls’ experiences more

immediately. I wanted to include girls’ voices in interpreting the process as well as the outcome of production in

order to get their take on the experience of learning in a collaborative context, their message, and its intended

audience.

I spent fourteen months documenting one adolescent Girl Scout troop’s implementation of GSUSA’s

critical media literacy program Media Know-How within the context of a season of troop activities they shared.

Members of an ancillary troop allowed me to observe their implementation of the program during one monthly

meeting. I gathered data from September 30, 2001, through December 12, 2002, though I began working to

negotiate entry to a research site in May of 2001. Through interviews, observation, and transcript and document

analysis, I explored ways they approached producing a media text and the topics and concerns that informed their

choices. This qualitative case study was not designed as an exercise in program assessment. Rather, my purpose was

to add to the scholarly knowledge about what is important, annoying, meaningful, and distressing to girls, and upon

what standards and values they base their judgments. I chose the focal troop not only because of the opportunity to

observe its sessions over time, but because as Cadette and Senior Girl Scouts, their Media Know-How

implementation would include the collaborative composition of a message. Cadette Girl Scouts, again, include girls

in grades six through nine, or usually eleven to fifteen years old while Seniors are fifteen- to seventeen- or eighteenyear-

old tenth through twelfth graders. Moreover, because of the social pressures facing girls as they enter

adolescence (Brown, 2001; Cherland, 1994; Debold, 2001; Finders, 1997; Gilligan, 1993, 1995), I sought an

adolescent troop to take part in this study.

The selection of both research site and subjects had much to do with negotiating entry with the Girl Scouts

organization. Similar to Alvermann et al.’s public library-based study of outside school literacy (1999), invitations

to take part in this research were issued across a geographic region and participants self-selected into the project. So

while I was looking for specific characteristics—in particular, for adolescent Girl Scouts, along with a willingness to

participate in Media Know-How and as much diversity as I could find—in the end, identifying subjects and thus

determining a setting for this project came down to which troop(s) within that framework selected me. I determined

that this way of coming to participation, this dynamic of subject volition, was appropriate given my research

questions and their focus on identifying adolescent girls’ interests in participating in a critical media literacy

program and an outside-school organization for girls.

By May of 2001, I had contacted program directors of four councils and left messages with a camp director

at a fifth. Two councils, including the Golden Path Council, where I eventually conducted most of my research, are

located in one state; one (the Running Waters Council, where the younger troop I observed on one occasion met)

includes communities in that state and an adjacent state, in which the camp where I made inquiries is also located;

and the fourth council includes communities across the border of a third state. By September I had spoken with

program directors and field managers in the offices of each of the four councils. All were receptive to my call and

agreed to pass along word of my proposed study to their service unit managers and, subsequently, troop leaders. I

shared an abstract of my proposed research project with each regional Girl Scout official with whom I spoke. It was

difficult, however, to locate a focal troop in this way because troop activities are troop driven; therefore, people at

the Council level could not know what programs groups of girls in different towns would choose to complete in the

coming school year. Most troops, at least in the councils where I made contact, meet during the months of the

traditional school year with some members continuing their involvement in Girl Scouting into the summer through

attending programs at area Girl Scout camps. In August of 2001, as the result of a telephone inquiry, I got a spot on

the agenda of the Golden Path Council service unit meeting (a meeting of volunteers representing the various

population clusters in the council) and described my project to the women assembled there. Three troop leaders

listed their names and additional contact information. (Note: All local/regional proper names in this report are

pseudonymous to ensure participants’ confidentiality; research participants likewise are identified with

pseudonyms.)

Meanwhile, I had continued to make inquiries to personnel at other council offices, in particular Running

Waters, whose program director put me in touch with two troop leaders. One was willing to participate but her Daisy

troop was too young; another, who worked with middle school-age girls, indicated that their troop schedule for the

coming year would not accommodate my research plans. Yet also during the first month of the 2001-2002 academic

year, a colleague put me in touch with another troop leader from the Running Waters Council. She was intrigued to

learn about Media Know-How, and upon obtaining copies of the booklets from council headquarters, was

enthusiastic about the program and reported that she would encourage her troop of older Junior Girl Scouts to make

it the centerpiece of one of their monthly meetings. While I observed that meeting and appreciated the troop’s

willingness to try the new Media Know-How program and invite me to observe the session, I concluded that

documentation of one monthly session was not comparable to the rich field of data I gathered from the focal troop.

A follow-up phone call after the August 2001 meeting led to my initial observation of the focal troop, when they

gathered on a Sunday afternoon in September in the sun room of a fast food chain.

Research Setting

The primary site for this study is the town of Astoria, a mostly working- and middle-class Midwestern

community whose population is approximately 8,000. It is, then, a small town, with one public middle school whose

enrollment was 496 and whose public high school enrollment was 653 during the 2001-02 school year (Telephone

communication 6 February 2003). Its student athletes and musicians compete in the 3-A division, where 4-A denotes

the largest schools in the largely rural state where the town abides. Astoria has a handful of banks, its own twoscreen

cinema, and a collection of Main Street businesses and restaurants along with the regional fixtures Hardee’s,

Pizza Hut, and Wal-Mart.

According to Astoria Chamber of Commerce staff, during the course of this study the largest local

employers included a Wal-Mart distribution center, four factories, and the public school district. Near the end of this

study, Astoria lost 325 jobs when a smaller manufacturer closed its local plant to consolidate production in a

Southern state and an additional manufacturer, again not among the top six local employers, cut its workforce by 15

percent (Telephone communication 6 February 2003). In addition to its public schools, Astoria is home to a private

four-year college and a K-12 Christian school that operates in the shell of an old discount store. The Springfield

Community College operates a satellite campus in what used to be a downtown department store. Springfield is a

community of some twenty-five to thirty thousand citizens, some twenty-five to thirty miles away. It is also the site

of the regional Girl Scout council headquarters.

Many adults who live in Astoria grew up there, and the number of years one—or indeed, one’s family—has

resided in the community can have more to do with one’s standing within it than the number of years of

postsecondary education, or dollars in annual earnings, one claims. The median family income in Astoria was

$46,062 while the median household income was $35,558 in 2000. Meanwhile, state median income averages were,

respectively, $48,005 and $39,462, according to the Workforce Development Agency Web site posted by officials of

the state in which Astoria is located. According to Astoria Community School District officials, 351 students

qualified for free school lunches and 129 for reduced-price lunches during the 1999-2000 school year, when total

district enrollment for grades K-12 was 2,176 (telephone communication, 6 February 2003). In addition to being

mostly lower- to middle-income, the population of Astoria was also overwhelmingly White, though there is a

growing Asian, mostly Laotian and Vietnamese, population, along with a smaller but also growing Latino

population.

For the reported study, data collection sites included the afore-mentioned Hardee’s, two focal troop

members’ homes, a Methodist church, a Presbyterian church, a park shelter, a community festival held at a park, a

pizzeria, a steak buffet restaurant in Astoria and one in Springfield, the Springfield Country Club, Girl Scout council

headquarters for the region (located in Springfield), and Astoria’s lone radio station.

Focal Subjects

Primary subject-participants in this study were the members of one focal troop of Cadette and Senior Girl

Scouts and their leaders. The group included six members: Chaz, Erin, Michelle, Mikayla, Emily, and Natalie. A

seventh girl, Jessica, left the troop during the observation period. Except for Erin, who was in tenth grade when the

study began, I observed members of the focal troop during their freshman year and the first months of their

sophomore year. Thus, while Erin was a Senior Girl Scout when I began observing the troop, the other girls were

Cadettes during most of the time of this study and became Senior Girl Scouts during the summer of 2002. Other

focal participants include the troop leader, Vickie, who is Chaz’s mother. The troop’s co-leader, Lisa, who is

Vickie’s sister-in-law and Chaz’s aunt, left the community and also the troop near the end of the first school year I

observed them.

Like most Astorians, the focal girls lived in surroundings that are in every way comfortable but by no

means plush. Also like most Astorians, they could be classified as members of the working or middle class. Vickie

Wells was an information technology specialist (a digital importer) at an Astoria industry and her husband, Chaz’s

father, worked as a service technician. Erin’s dad, who died suddenly in the spring of 2004, worked as a driver for

FedEx during the time his daughter participated in this study, while Erin’s mom worked at Main St. Pizzeria with

Michelle’s mom. Michelle’s father farmed. Mikayla’s father worked as a construction engineer at and vice president

of a local construction company while Mikayla’s mom was the elementary talented and gifted (TAG) instructor and

a junior-senior high school coach for a small, neighboring public school district. Emily’s parents both were

employed at the same local factory. Natalie, the only focal participant whose parents were not married to each other,

For the most part, these girls had been friends for a long time, and their membership in the troop was

longstanding. There were exceptions, though—or perhaps more precisely, variations. While Chaz, Erin, Jessica, and

Michelle’s history with the troop was as old as the troop itself, dating back to their kindergarten year together as

Daisy Scouts (Vickie’s history as troop leader reached as far), Mikayla joined after she moved from Springfield to

Astoria when she was in the third grade, while Emily defied membership trends by joining during middle school.

Natalie’s affiliation with the troop was longstanding, but like Emily’s, more peripheral. Each of these two girls took

part in troop activities more on the basis of her interest in them than her availability to attend.

Chaz, more than anyone, was the leader and spokesperson of the Astoria Cadettes. She spoke relatively

frequently and often at greater length than her troopmates. Moreover, whether in answer to an interview question or

at the start of a presentation to a community group, Chaz often spoke first and set the terms of the focal troop’s

enactment of its collective identity. She seemed to enjoy assuming the leadership role she so often stepped into, and

to prize opportunities to do so—and to experience frustration when they were not proffered. When I asked her and

her troopmates about their experience with group work at school, Chaz reported that “It’s usually one person that’s

in charge and then you have to listen to ‘em.” The implication was that in the classroom, she did not enjoy regular

access to the subject position of being “in charge” and that she did not relish “having to listen,” at least not

exclusively or passively. Chaz was the sort of girl who looked adults and cameras straight in the eye. Tall and

strong, she was a powerful softball pitcher for the Astoria Tigers in addition to performing in the concert band, as a

flag girl in the marching band, and in the high school chorus. She was additionally an avid participant in her church

and its youth group.

Erin was a quiet girl with a steady temperament and a warm sense of humor. I came to refer to her as the

glue of the troop in that her regular presence and vocalization of support of the other Astoria Cadettes’ observations

set the standard for performing and renewing troop cohesion. On more than one occasion, she said that she didn’t

enjoy speech class, though she prepared for and delivered a topical subsection of the troop’s public presentation to

members of the local Kiwanis club. Erin was particularly close to Chaz; they spent time together outside the troop.

And though she often spoke to affirm her good friend’s pronouncements with a succinct “Yeah,” I never thought of

Erin as deferential to Chaz, but rather, saw the friends’ attributes as complementary. Where Erin seemed

comfortable basking in Chaz’s light, Chaz enjoyed Erin’s presence like cool shade. Like all her troopmates and their

adult leaders, Erin made the occasional irreverent or teasing statement in addition to her more frequently earnest

remarks. Erin was shorter than average, with long, straight hair and pale, almost transparent eyes in an aqua tint I’ve

never seen in any other actual face and of whose description in a novel I’d be skeptical.

Michelle was the focal girl I thought of as the most typical teen. Tall, slender, and pretty, she seemed to

possess a certain wistfulness. Toward the end of the study, she forwarded an e-mail about “How to Treat a Girl on a

Date,” a message dripping in romance ideology simultaneously present with an implicit yearning to be cherished.

Michelle sometimes challenged Chaz’s declarations, or amended them; she also critiqued the radio script for internal

inconsistency. Michelle at times inflected her comments with a certain theatrical irony as she parodied teen behavior

or media representations. Yet she, like her troopmates, was by turns earnest as well as irreverent. Michelle was good

friends with Mikayla. When I e-mailed her requesting consent to describe my study for the council newsletter (as I

was invited to do when I interviewed the council’s vice president for membership and programs), Michelle sent back

a reply signed “Yours in Girl Scouting” with both their names. Michelle also was good friends with Jessica, at least

at the start of the study. During the ice breaker she led at the start of Sports Event for younger girls, when she

directed each of them in turn to say something they liked to do, Michelle opened with, “I like hanging out with my

good friend, Jessica.” Emily came to the troop during middle school because of her friendship with Jessica and

Michelle. Michelle was a cheerleader for the wrestling squad. She was the second of four children; her older brother

and his girlfriend, who spoke during a Decisions for Your Life session, were raising a baby together. Michelle at

once, or alternately, expressed affection for the baby and awareness of the challenges the young couple faced as

parents.

Mikayla was a smart, artistically talented, somewhat quirky girl with a quick, dry wit. She was tall and so

thin that people mentioned it when they mentioned her. She enjoyed science fiction. When Vickie was late for a

rehearsal of the troop’s upcoming presentation for local troop leaders, a dance routine, the girls took to the church

basement stage in part to practice and in part to improvise in a playful way. The routine involved flags and Mikayla

said, “It’s the only chance I’ll get to be a flag girl,” picked one up, and started hamming a part. She described her

older brother as “annoying” and herself as “normal” with “crazy moments.” She was an animal lover who favored

turtles, real and represented. Hers was the only firmly middle-class family among my research participants’.

Natalie was an intelligent, rather hip girl, who liked all kinds of music and adored her younger sister. An

subjects were learning to drive and the kindness of a stranger who stopped at her little sister’s lemonade stand and

generously overpaid. She wrote for the school paper as well and took part in speech activities. A tall, large girl,

Natalie was proud of being selected to attend JEL (Just Eliminate Lies, an anti-tobacco public relations campaign

that includes teens) camp. Like Emily, Natalie took part in some troop activities but not others.

Emily was another outspoken member of the troop. She loved interacting with younger girls and was prone

to brief bouts of singing. She fondly recalled watching the “Vegi-Tales” Christian cartoon series when she was

younger and remembered its theme song, which she sang off and on en route to the annual council banquet. Emily, a

cute, petite blonde, was the sort of girl one might label perky. During the course of the study, she was the only girl

who spoke of having a regular boyfriend (though Chaz kept in touch with an out-of-town boy she’d met at a church

camp the summer before I began observing the troop). She sang in the high school chorus and bagged groceries at a

local store.

During the time of the study, in addition to their participation in Girl Scouts, each of these focal subjects

were involved in at least one school-sponsored extracurricular activity. Most took part in the marching band or flag

Michelle were cheerleaders for the wrestling squad. Chaz, Michelle, and Emily participated in the school’s vocal as

well as instrumental music program, in which Erin also took part (and, as noted, Chaz played softball). Mikayla and

Emily won academic recognition. In addition, Mikayla played on the ninth grade volleyball squad, while Chaz, Erin,

and Natalie were active in their churches. Chaz and Erin belonged to the town’s only Methodist congregation while

Natalie attended the local Mennonite church. By the end of the fourteen months I observed them, Erin was no longer

the only one driving and most of the focal girls had jobs.

Jessica remains the enigma of the troop for me, because she quit attending during the course of the study

and did not take part in any group interviews. She and Michelle had a longstanding friendship. Her parents attended

their older kids’ ballgames and dance recitals with their younger ones in tow.

Vickie had been the adult leader of the troop since she organized it during Chaz’s kindergarten year. She

was a working class, working mom with a deep Christian faith and a cheeky sense of humor. For instance, when the

girls were discussing whether to have a bonfire or use the grill to roast hot dogs at an event they planned for younger

girls, Vickie chuckled at the inadvertent antecedent when, following a mention not of the food but of the children,

she said, “Are we having a bonfire or are we cooking ‘em on the grill?” Lisa was quiet, but like the others, prone to

saucy humor. When Mikayla brought in coasters for everyone, Lisa received one whose design featured Holstein

cows. Lisa laughed that one in the foreground of her coaster showed its backside to the viewer and looked over its

shoulder, “Like it’s saying, ‘Kiss my rear end.’”

Decisions for Your Life

Like Media Know-How, Decisions for Your Life is part of the Girl Scouts’ Contemporary Issues series of

programs for girls. The goal of Media Know-How is the achievement of media literacy through learning about

different genres and how they are constructed, practicing critical and deliberate media consumption, and, for older

girls, the collaborative and creative production of a media text. The goal of Decisions for Your Life is teen

pregnancy prevention; its title implies that it is rooted in the larger program goal of reflective decision making. The

program likely is additionally informed by the basic Girl Scouts program goal of realizing one’s potential and

cultivating self-esteem given that caring for a child can complicate a girl’s plans to complete or continue her

schooling.

The focal troop already had plans to complete Decisions for Your Life when I first met with them near the

outset of the 2001-2002 school year (I discovered in the troop’s enactment of Media Know-How that unfinished

business from one year might be taken up during the next). Their implementation of the program was fairly

elaborate. Vickie and Lisa assembled a roster of guest speakers and Vickie submitted an outline of the troop’s

planned implementation of the program to council officials in Springfield and sent copies home to parents of focal

girls. The program was to take place over seven weeks and include presentations from the Astoria Methodist Church

youth minister, a representative of Planned Parenthood, and four teen couples who had faced unintended pregnancy

and responded by choosing, alternately, adoption, abortion, and, in two instances, early parenthood. The first couple

included a friend of Lisa’s college-age daughter and one of the parenting couples included Michelle’s older brother

and his girlfriend. Finally, the girls were scheduled to hear from a couple who married and had a child after they

were well into adulthood. Sessions were scheduled consecutive Monday evenings during the winter and spring of

2002 in a Sunday school classroom of the Astoria Methodist Church. The program was shortened when the couple

who’d opted to terminate their pregnancy and one of the couples who’d opted for early parenthood opted not to

show up. In addition to hearing from and asking questions of the guest speakers, the Astoria Cadettes’

implementation of Decisions for Your Life included each girl’s listing of personal goals. Among Michelle’s goals,

in addition to “Become a better person,” are “Learn to resist boys, Set boundaries, Stay a virgin, [and] Control

hormones.” Erin’s list includes “Get a b/f [boyfriend] that will understand me + what I want to do/not do.” A

generous reading of this goal is of a girl who wants to have it all. Jessica listed “Control my hormones [and] Stay a

virgin.” Mikayla’s goals include “Understand yourself, resist temptations, [and] know boundaries.” Chaz recorded

only two goals: “Stay a virgin [and] To stay on top of school and keep grades up.” Only Natalie did not include

avoiding sexual activity among her list of personal goals.

The Astoria Cadettes’ Media Know-How project was a radio spot that drew upon their completion of

Decisions for Your Life. Their public service announcement took the form of a cautionary vignette designed to

promote the Decisions for Your Life goal of teen pregnancy prevention. Focal troop members took up their Media

Know-How project as a service project through which they might extend the support they received through their

involvement in Scouts to an audience of other girls. Their comments about the project and about their participation

in Girl Scouts, as I report below, indicate that focal girls found their project empowering in that it offered them a

way to contribute to the public dialogue about teen sexuality and early parenthood, to offer a supportive message to

other girls, and to speak against a discourse of adolescent experimentation and the inevitability of yielding to

curiosity or acquiescing to boys. The troop’s approaches to authorship were collaborative, recursive, and extended

over time. The group’s process in authoring a public service announcement reflected focal girls’ desire to intervene

in prevalent social norms of gendered adolescence. I also discuss tensions between the overlapping, contesting

discourses focal girls reproduced and deployed against one another in authoring the script of their radio text.

Focal girls’ process of authorship involved multiple drafts, even versions, and the luxury of a flexible time

frame for completion. The Astoria Cadettes’ participation in Media Know-How differed from their other troop

activities in that it was prompted by this study, though subjects self-selected into the project. I phoned Vickie, one of

the troop leaders who had left contact information at the August 2001 meeting where I presented my research

project and invited participation in it, after the school year began and joined a troop meeting in the sun room of a

fast food restaurant, taking along the program booklets I’d ordered from national headquarters. The girls leafed

through them and voted to complete the Media Know-How program and let me observe and document their

implementation of it. They told me they already had some activities scheduled, including a Sports Event for younger

girls in October, but that I was welcome to observe their conduct of this and other events in order to develop a sense

of how they went about getting things done. Focal girls started mulling potential messages and genres on the spot,

including producing a radio segment and “putting together” an ad based on their upcoming participation in the

Decisions for Your Life program as possibilities for their Media Know-How project.

At the initial meeting, Mikayla was selected to chair the troop’s implementation of Media Know-How

because she needed to fulfill that role in order to become eligible for an organizational award. Mikayla took home

the GSUSA booklet for Cadette and Senior girls and during the troop’s subsequent meeting she described the

program to Erin, Chaz, and Michelle. I never saw focal troop members refer to the booklet again.

Upon deciding to participate in Media Know-How, focal girls’ approach was leisurely and free-ranging as

they explored possible messages and electronic media genres before determining the ultimate focus of their project.

During a spring 2002 meeting convened to plan for several upcoming activities, focal girls mulled a possible

television spot informed by anti-drug messages in that medium. Their talk was casual and included questions about

casting and costumes. Who would be the people on the street corner (the antagonists offering drugs), Michelle

wondered, and what would they wear? The girls were half-playful, half-mocking in envisioning the hypothetical

spot, which they seemed to recognize as clichéd. “Girl Scouts is our anti-drug,” Erin quipped. The data suggest that

her parodic comment was intended to mock the genre and not the organization. Chaz, for instance, spoke during the

April interview about the artificiality of such ads’ treatment of peer pressure as isolated and episodic “when it goes

on so long.” Thus, focal girls brought critical insight into both cultural forms and cultural norms to bear on the

construction of their message. They also enjoyed an element of shared play in imagining possible scripts, even while

they simultaneously took stances which regarded familiar cautionary messages as trite. The social context of the

troop afforded a space both to offer silly messages and to deconstruct them. The outside-school, girl-determined, and

project-driven setting, as indicated, additionally afforded troop members the luxury of time: They began mulling

ideas in September, lightly discussed possible topics in early March, brainstormed specific messages following their

Decisions for Your Life sessions in late March and April, wrote and revised a script based on one of these scenarios

after troop meetings resumed in September and October, and finally recorded their message in December.

Once focal girls determined that their media text would not only center on resisting peer pressure but

specifically promote the Decisions for Your Life objective of pregnancy prevention, they brought a relaxed and

recursive approach to determining its ultimate content. At the end of three Decisions for Your Life meetings, when

guest speakers were not present, focal girls brainstormed several dramatic scenes. Among them was a two-episode

dialogue between two girls, before and after one goes on a big date during which she has sex and gets pregnant. The

vignette was to be set in a school locker room following gym class on consecutive days. A second locker room

scenario the girls mulled took the form of a cautionary tale not to be like a persona whose sexual experimentation

becomes the subject of locker-room talk. The second scenario gave way to a girl-boy dialogue, which eventually

became a dialogue between two girls. The first vignette was abandoned for its problematic timeline while the

second, built upon an off-color joke, was rejected as unsuitable for television or radio broadcast. Yet the girls

seemingly enjoyed repeating it and imagining its performance: “Did you hear about Caitlin?” “She goes up and

down like an elevator.” Focal girls seemingly took some pleasure in pushing the boundaries of appropriate speech,

albeit in a private instead of public context. Imagined performances of the spot permitted the playful assumption of a

persona who did not enact niceness—or tolerance, for that matter. This scenario shows the girls’ awareness of an

adolescent politics of reputation pervasive enough that they reproduce it even in their irreverent backstage

performance of a message about how—or more precisely, how not—to navigate this social sphere. Focal girls also

relished Natalie’s proffered bit of girl-boy dialogue in the form of an invitation to have sexual intercourse, to which

the girl replies, “And maybe get STD’s and get pregnant and ruin my life? Sure, let’s go!” The girls appreciated the

frankness of this message, they told me. It was additionally likely that they enjoyed the female character’s insight

and authoritative subject position as well as her tone. This sort of resistant, confrontational talk pushes the

boundaries of sanctioned speech according to gender norms in that the girl is not acquiescent.

It is somewhat poignant, then, that the troop abandoned this version after Michelle raised the question,

“Where are we going to get a guy to do this?” Heinrich (2001) describes the pressures boys face to conform to the

standards of hegemonic masculinity, and focal girls seemed very much aware of that discourse as it affected the

boys they knew. They realized that they would encounter difficulty getting a boy to appear in a Girl Scouts public

service announcement, in particular one that promotes abstinence. Even though they envisioned a male character

who seeks heterosexual sexual activity, focal girls seemed to appreciate that boys would be reluctant to be

associated with a girls’ organization and an anti-sexual intercourse message. While they seemed to reject masculinist

discourse, they did not set out to challenge it in their social circles beyond the troop but rather to go around boys’

social practices by composing an alternate message—or an approach that relied on detour rather than deconstruction.

Their message addresses how to manage masculine behavior and the longing to be loved, not how to interrogate

them. Focal girls’ pragmatism in this way reproduced the gendered enactment of accommodation. In the

complicated dynamics of the overlapping and counterpoised social norms they navigated, adopting some, adapting

some, and challenging others, focal girls were Bakhtinian ventriloquists (1981) and agents of bricolage (Tobin,

2001) as they pieced together a textual mosaic of their desires and concerns. Their final product script, of a dialogue

between two girls, one pregnant and the other already parenting, like their imagined ironic “Let’s go!” spot, equates

refusal with resistance. In it, focal girls do not reveal a judgmental attitude with regard to teen sexual activity, but

rather an earnest apprehension of how it might occur.

At the final Spring 2002 meeting of Decisions for Your Life, the girls did some drafting on the spot, with

Chaz assuming the position of official recorder. Vickie did not arrive until after the session was well underway and

the girls had moved to the church basement to rehearse their performance at an upcoming Astoria Service Unit

meeting. Before they adjourned, the troop arranged to meet before the meeting the following week, but a scheduling

conflict forced a postponement, summer arrived, and work on the project was postponed until the next school year.

I had a chance to ask some of the girls in the summer and during the first group interview in April 2002,

while they were still mulling possible scenarios, what informed their approach to authoring a public service

announcement for teens. They said that they did not want to author a spot that would be overly simplistic or upbeat

in the manner of certain anti-intercourse and anti-smoking and substance use television and radio ads aimed at teens.

Informants wrote their text in response to such messages as a contemporary radio vignette set in a bowling alley and

framed as a celebration of chastity. I asked them the difference between effective and ineffective messages in the

genre:

I: What would a good commercial look like? 476

Chaz: Well, I mean like having things that like a, having that a child, 477

like a teenager wrote it. And you can tell– 478

Emily: Right. 479

Chaz: –what an adult wrote and what a child wrote. 480

Erin: Yeah. 481

Mikayla: Yeah. 482

Chaz: Because, just by the words that they put in it and how they 483

come across, gettin’ the point across. Like what Natalie said. Do you 484

want to have sex? Do you want to mess up my life? And kinda go 485

through that. I mean, that’d get the point across, sayin’, you know, you 486

shouldn’t be doin’ this ‘cause this is what’s wrong. This’ll make your 487

life so messed up. 488

Erin: Right. 489

Chaz: And this is what I don’t want. 490

Taken in conjunction with their goals of avoiding temptation and their comments about the force of peer

pressure over the course of the study, Chaz’s contrast of effective and ineffective messages emphasized her

awareness that cautionary media texts are part of a counter-discourse to a more prevalent social practice of teen

adolescence which is hard to resist even when one wants to do so, a counter-discourse which needs to be forthright

in order to resonate.

Following one of the Decisions for Your Life sessions, Chaz declared, “I don’t want to be like the girl in

pregnant. The film’s plot centers on a contest among a group of male teens to see which one of them can lose his

virginity first. When I interviewed focal girls about their habits and preferences in popular genres in July, Chaz

in movies. The interview also included a series of comments about genuineness and social pretense among other

kids they knew at school. I asked how their Media Know-How project would address those themes and their other

Girl Scout activities:

Erin: All the stuff from Planned Parenthood and stuff. 250

U: Mm hm. 251

Chaz: I mean, it just gives you real life. Scouts, you don’t have to 252

prove to somebody– 253

Erin: Yeah. 254

(Laughter) 255

Michelle: My cookie! 256

(A playful digression; the interview took place at a pizza parlor)

Chaz: I mean, like you don’t have to be somebody you’re not to be

accepted in Scouts. And it’s like in the real world, to me, you know 257

how—You don’t have to do somethin’, like you don’t have to go 258

out and smoke or lose your virginity or somethin’ just because other 259

people are doin’ it. I mean, you can be your own person. 260

In her explanation of the relevance of their media project to their lived experience, Chaz echoed the theme

of acceptance which focal girls recurrently reported as central to their participation in Girl Scouts (informing my

interpretation of the satiric target of Erin’s “Girl Scouts is our anti-drug” remark). Chaz’s recurrent use of the phrase

“you don’t have to” to contrast the ways of being that were available within the Scouting community with those

available in the school social world underscores the dilemma she faced as she felt forced to choose between

unappealing options in order to participate in the larger discourses of gender and adolescence. In the larger teen

community, she implied, teens must engage in behavior that is risky or at odds with their values or agendas, or face

rejection. Her observations parallel those of participants in the AAUW Sister-to-Sister Summits.

In my complete thesis, I explain and illustrate how focal girls seemed to believe that they had the power, as

legitimate central participants in discourse of the troop, to give shape to its unfolding discursive traditions. Focal

girls deliberately set out to use their Media Know-How project, a public service radio spot in the form of a

cautionary vignette, to spin the discourse of Scouting against the more prevalent discourse of acquiescent adolescent

femininity they experienced at Astoria High School and in the community beyond.

Here is how the focal troop’s final draft, completed during the van ride to a field trip and revised and

rehearsed two days later at the meeting room of a church no research participant attended, reads, as Chaz

subsequently formatted it on her word processor:

pregnant. He said he wasn’t ready and wasn’t his problem. And you think life will be so easy. Well guess

again. I can’t go out on Friday nights. I have to work 2 jobs and I had planned to go to college but that’s all

What have I done?

3) Teen pregnancy is not an option.

4) Always set your boundaries, and don’t let guys run your life.

5) Make the right choices, and don’t have sex until your married.

6) If you want to have success, don’t have SEX!

Brought to you by Girl Scout Troop 346 of Astoria.

Michelle took issue with some elements of the script during the revision and rehearsal session, noting that

her brother’s girlfriend attended Springfield Community College, where child care cost far less than the private

sitters her brother and his girlfriend sometimes hired. Michelle’s observed experience did not mesh with details of

the media text. In addition, Michelle cast a critical eye on tensions within the script:

Michelle: This kinda contradicts itself. It talks about, like, she has 1221

to work two jobs and stuff, but she doesn’t use a baby sitter for

anything. 1222

1 While their script read “Absence,” focal girls correctly pronounced the word Chaz had misspelled on her

word processor.

U: Uh, that’s true. 1223

Erin: It can just be like, had to file for unemployment. To do things 1224

you never thought you would do, like file for, like food stamps. 1225

Chaz: Food stamps. But yeah. Single mom, so . . . 1226-

1228

Michelle: And she doesn’t even get any support from the boy. 1229

Chaz: From the husband, ‘cause he left her before the baby was born 1230

when he got her pregnant. ‘Cause he wasn’t ready. 1231

The girls talked through their scenario to reach an explanation for Michelle’s objection. In critiquing the

text and ultimately approving it, Michelle revealed a complicated preoccupation with realism as she sought to help

construct a media message that at once had integrity and would “tell it like it is” but that she could reconcile with the

circumstances of teen parenthood she has witnessed in her own family. Meanwhile, Chaz’s wording shows that

social discursive norms, such as the ideal of the family, can be so thoroughly apprenticed that one uses the language

of prevalent discourses (“the husband,” line 1230) even in discussions that demonstrate awareness that these ideals

are often myths.

As they had when they realized that the boys they knew would be hesitant to appear in a Girl Scouts

pregnancy prevention PSA, focal girls once again had to adjust to circumstances beyond the troop in completing

their Media Know-How project. The local videographer declined to shoot the spot pro bono, citing a full fall

schedule and a need to start rejecting the increasingly frequent requests Astorians were making on behalf of their

organizations. The girls opted to approach the local radio station instead. Given the tips for production included in

the Media Know-How booklets for Cadette and Senior Girl Scouts, it is noteworthy that they did not videotape the

spot themselves and in fact never discussed the option in my presence. Their approach to producing a media text

focused more on the text itself than on the technical aspects of its production.

On December 12, 2002, Chaz, Erin, Mikayla, and Michelle recorded their Media Know-How message at

the single radio station located in Astoria. It took five takes and it follows the script reproduced above, with the

exception that the line “What have I done?” is omitted. Chaz and Michelle read the roles they had rehearsed more

than two months earlier at the Presbyterian church, while Erin and Mikayla read alternate lines of concluding

narrative. A girl I’d never seen before, wearing pigtails and fuzzy slippers, witnessed the taping. The announcement

lasts seventy seconds.

According to Bakhtin’s dialogic theory (1981), our words are only half our own. Through our engagement

with the social world we enter and reproduce a practice of multi-voicedness and ventriloquism as we give voice to

established ways of speaking ourselves and the world into being. The combinations we piece together reflect our

multiple subject positions. The Astoria Cadettes authored a hybrid text that reproduces certain discursive

conventions without question and deliberately deploys other discursive conventions against the dynamics of

gendered adolescence they find most threatening.

According to one dichotomous social trope, adolescent boys seek sexual encounters while adolescent girls

seek relationships, and (heterosexual) males and females of any age may barter one for the other. While remarking

such a phenomenon may well lead to insight into cultural values and assumptions and what is constructed as

“proper” behavior according to gender norms, and even become a first step toward deconstructing these norms,

when the observance is circulated as a maxim, its circulation and uptake can perpetuate the assumption that such

values and ways of behaving are innate. Focal girls focused on managing rather than interrogating the manifestation

of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity in dating relationships. At the same time, the goals they listed as part of their

participation in Decisions for Your Life indicate that focal girls experienced or at least recognized that girls have

sexual urges as well as a desire for interpersonal connection and romance.

As their summer interview responses indicate, focal girls’ loathing of fakery in media directed at them

(Davies, 1998) extended to sugarcoating and simplification. They wanted bluntness in their message; and while their

message reproduced certain reductive representations of gendered behavior as well as melodramatic narrative

formulas, they saw it as informed by a complicated social context. For participants in this study, saying no to sexual

activity was a way of being true to themselves and protecting their own goals, while saying yes to a boyfriend’s

advances represented a case of putting another’s wishes or others’ expectations ahead of one’s own desires. Even

while informants acknowledged conflicting desires, as Mikayla made explicit in her exit interview remark that girls

who were ambivalent about sexual involvement might find comfort in the knowledge that other girls have faced the

same decision, the desire to protect oneself from pregnancy and heartache seemed to supersede the desire for sexual

activity and for winning a boyfriend’s ongoing or enhanced affection. The risks of a sexual relationship outweighed

the potential benefits. Michelle indirectly acknowledged the power of felt internal and external pressures to

experiment and acquiesce in her assertion that the troop’s media message needed to be blunt in order to counter

these forces, that it needed to “hit ‘em over the head.”

Focal girls saw their collaboratively constructed cautionary tale as an affirmation of their goals for future

schooling as well as a forum for speaking against prevalent discourses of acquiescent femininity; they regarded their

project as both situated within and potentially informing the discourse of adolescent femininity and sexualization

that they witnessed and experienced in their school and community, and as offering support to an audience of girls

who were navigating these social spheres. Focal girls characterized their message, with its exhortation to postpone

sexual activity, as resistant rather than reproductive of social norms.

Yet at the same time it exhorts resistance, the troop’s message expounds abstinence, or a way of enacting

“goodness” as girls. The choice focal girls put forth as their own is surely one many adults hold out for youth, girls

in particular. The overlapping discourses and subject positions adolescent girls experience encompass their

relationships to contradictory standards of young womanhood. Because all performances of literacy and learning

activities are informed by participants’ complicated perspectives, it can be instructive to invite youth to share their

views in order to know what the meaningful implementation of critical media education can look like in various

settings. The Astoria Cadettes’ implementation of Media Know-How reminds us that there are many ways to read

against the grain. Progressive educators must be cognizant of and responsive to learners’ diverse perspectives as

they are socioeconomic and familial factors as well as the more obvious markers of “race” and gender. Most of the

Astoria Cadettes hoped to be among the first generation in their families to obtain a college degree, a prospect they

viewed as contingent—an opportunity deliberately to be guarded rather than presumed. The seeming naiveté and

conventionality of their script was situated in a personal narrative of potentially expanding horizons.

Many approaches to gender, adolescence, popular media and culture, and literacy learning itself seem based

on the notion that there is a problem to be fixed in kids’ lives and little recognition of the social and intellectual

resources, insights, and agendas they bring to authorship and response. It is time to attend to them. And as Carol

Gilligan would admonish us, if we set out to create an open discursive arena in which girls are empowered to speak

from their experience, we’d better brace ourselves to hear the observations they share and to appreciate the

complexity of their experience. I contend that authentic critical literacy pedagogy depends upon it.

References

Alvermann, D., Young, J. P., Green, C., & Wisenbaker, J. M. (1999). Adolescents’ perceptions and negotiations of

264.

Foundation.

Francis.

doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, Iowa City.

Cryan, R. (November 17, 1999). Personal communication.

Press.

Debold, E. (2001). Engendering subjects: A Foucauldian analysis of developmental gender differences. In Packer,

198). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Enciso, P. (1998). Good/bad girls read together: Pre-adolescent girls’ co-authorship of feminine subject positions

Fine, M. (1993) Sexuality, schooling, and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire. In L. Weis & M.

State University of New York Press.

Allen & Unwin.

University Press.

of New York Press.

http://www.girlscouts.org/programs/program_goals. html

Girl Scouts of the USA.

Hayes, M. (1999, December). “I liked the part where/I didn’t like it when . . .”: Girls’ response to screen narratives.

Paper presented at the National Reading Conference annual meeting, Orlando, FL.

University of Iowa, Iowa City.

Almqvist & Wiskell International.

Chicago: The Bible House.

Press.

Townsend, S., & Van Scoy, S. (2004, February). KidsKnowBest.org: Exploring the lived literacies of high-schoolers

through “writing” with digital media. Presentation at the National Council of Teachers of English

Assembly for Research Midwinter Conference, Berkeley, CA.

Willinsky, J., & Hunniford, R. M. (1993). Reading the romance younger: The mirrors and fears of a preparatory

105). London/Bristol, PA: The Falmer Press.

By Anne Mamary

I. In the Beginning

white, working class English man committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, the hoover vacuum tube, a

relic from his recently-ended 30-year marriage, piping gas into his car’s passenger compartment.

December 31, 1974, the story begins at an “end of the world party” at a hippy commune where Clara Bowden,

daughter of Jehovah’s Witness, Jamaican immigrants, Hortense and Darcus, has landed in her flight from her mother

and Hortense’s predictions that the world will end in fire and destruction that very night. Our story begins when 19-

year-old Clara flees boyfriend Ryan Topps, newly converted Jehovah’s witness, who took the loss of Clara’s teeth in

a scooter accident as a sign that she was damned and he was among the chosen.

Well, the story starts in the final days of World War II, 1945, in a remote Bulgarian village on the Greek border far

from battle, when Archie Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal, a Bengali with a dead hand and very white teeth, aged 17

and 19, are crammed together by a roll of the dice into a tank crowded with misfits, the “buggered battalion.”

English and Bengali in the King’s army, Archie and Samad are an unlikely pair, but theirs is the relationship that

brings the rest of the novel’s characters together. Thirty years before their future wives, Clara Jones nee Bowden and

Alsana Iqbal nee Begum ever are born, Archie and Samad unite in the masculine temple of war, in a peculiar

colonial bond or in its despite.

Going back, going back, our story begins in the 1907 Kingston earthquake, in the splitting open of Ambrosia

Bowden at the birth of Hortense and in the shaking of all creation that sent a marble Madonna to crush Sir Edmund

Flecker Glenard, the Englishman about to rape Ambrosia, sending his teeth skittering across the heaving church

floor.

The story begins with three women, Clara, Alsana, and Alsana’s niece, Neena, crowded onto a North London park

bench late in 1975. Over lunch, the pregnant Clara and Alsana, having realized that their husbands tell each other

everything and their girl-wives nothing, form an alliance and then a friendship as “a rearguard action against their

husbands’ friendship” (63). Only two years older than Neena, Alsana calls her lesbian, free-spirited niece, “Niece of

Shame,” and counters Neena’s insistence that husbands and wives should talk to each other with her own certainty

that the less she knows about Samad, the better. It is these women who talk to each other, who plan their futures and

the futures of the coming Iqbal twins, Millat and Magid, and the coming Jones girl, whom Clara will name Irie,

patois for “cool, peaceful, everything’s ok.”

Somewhere nearby, but worlds apart, Joshua Chalfen is on the way, too, the first son of horticulturalist Joyce

Chalfen and her geneticist husband, Marcus. At the beginning, with four babies coming, how can we know that one

fine day in the middle of the night, Samad will split the world apart, effectively kidnapping Magid, his elder son by

two minutes, and sending him off to Bengal. How can we know, at the beginning, that these four kids will change

England, will ignite England, will create a future no one can yet imagine?

From the start, Zadie Smith makes it clear that there are no neutral spaces, that history is everywhere, that

nothing is simple. By the end of the book, talking across generations, experiences, gender and race, Irie wishes she

could make Samad Miah Iqbal feel better about the way his life has run and about how his sons have grown into

different men than Samad had hoped, despite his best and worst-made plans. Irie thinks, “but if you could begin

again, . . . if you could take them back to the source of the river, to the start of the story, to the homeland. . . . But

she didn’t say that, because he felt it as she felt it and both knew it was as useless as chasing your own shadow. . . .

[Instead she said], ‘Oh, Mr. Iqbal, I don’t know what to say. . .’” (336).

And maybe that’s where the book really starts, in histories of unspeakable violence, of blundering violence,

of broken hearts and dead hands, of false teeth and suicide attempts. Who knows what to say? But in Irie’s

wistfulness and Samad’s pain, Smith says a lot, wistfulness and pain signifying real loss, not only a mystical longing

for an imagined source. At the source are the violence, plunder and rape of empire. At the source are lies, false teeth

and anguish. At the source are cultures that did not ask for interference. Irie does not just put a brave face on it; she

does not tacitly forgive and excuse with brave new world ideas about the inevitability of cultural change and

progress. She shows us that there is not one answer to history—that seekers after Truth with a capital t tend not to

find it, but, still, there are truths and many lies. At the root, there is no source in which one can wash away the pain

At the root, Smith’s novel of empire and multi-cultural London decades later shows modernity in crisis and

fundamentalist responses to modernity as, at least in part, themselves modern responses. The so-called children of

the empire now populate London, and their children, like Irie, the twins and Josh, are English and busily changing

England, their England and yet painfully not their England at the same time. Almost every one of her characters

holds fast to what may seem like a misguided adherence or challenge to modernity’s single-minded belief in its own

inevitability and in the march of progress. But each character also holds these beliefs for reasons with which the

reader can find at least some sympathy. Neither does the book take a single, simple stand, posing a battle of good

and evil, of simple reasoned good triumphing over simple irrational evil, for such a premise would itself reify a

avoids utter relativism.

Smith suggests modernity and fundamentalist responses spring from similar sources and that they are often

conversations and battles among men. There is no larger-than-life hero or heroine in the novel, but a richly

populated, teeming life. While the overt, outward battles and clashes in a text often demand the most attention,

Smith offers a quiet alternative to them. In the end, Irie and Neena, along with other characters, male and female,

offer alternatives to a modern/fundamentalist duel. They offer a path that slips this masculinist embrace while

acknowledging a colonial, racist and sexist history. They remember and nurture the fundamentals without becoming

rigidly fundamentalist. They show how to hang on to roots to avoid blowing away into nothingness in the storms of

postcolonial England, and they know how to sever roots that bind and constrict. Irie’s is not the only way, but it is

one way. It’s hers, it’s cool, it’s ok, it’s Irie.

II. Twin Troubles

But before we can tell Irie’s story, we have to go back, back to twin trouble: her father, Archie, and Samad,

young soldiers in World War II. We have to go back, back to 1492, the year Isabella and Ferdinand, dressed in Arab

finery, signed the decrees forcing the expulsion or conversion of Spain’s Jewish and Arab populations, the year

Christopher Columbus set sail for India and stumbled upon the Americas. For Archie’s and Samad’s stories and the

stories of their children in postcolonial England start at the beginning of modernity, at the beginning of European

under the rule of the Muslim-Arab Umayyad government. Menocal writes:

The fact that Ferdinand and Isabella did not choose the path of tolerance is seen as an example of the

intractability and inevitability of intolerance, especially in the premodern era. But their actions may be far

better understood as the failure to make the more difficult decision, to have the courage to cultivate a

society that can live with its own flagrant contradictions. They chose instead to go down the modern path,

the one defined by an ethic of unity and harmony, and which is largely intolerant of contradiction. The

watershed at hand was certainly the rise of single-language and single-religion nations, a transformation

that conventionally stands at the beginning of the modern period and leads quite directly to our own. (271)

It took the Spanish Inquisition 100 years to force an end to pluralism in early modern Spain, and Archie

and Samad struggle with the same issues of pluralism late in the day, when modernity is beginning to crack. At the

end of World War II, and just three years before Indian independence, Archie and Samad play out colonial and

postcolonial contradictions. At first, all Archie can do is stare at Samad; later he feels a kind of friendship that “an

Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and color, a

friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical

proximity will not continue” (Smith 82). When their tank breaks down and their tank mates murdered, Samad and

Archie drift into a ‘real life’ friendship, friendship for the long haul, while they wait for someone to answer their

radio calls for help.

For Archie and Samad never see ‘action,’ their job to “make sure the war ran smoothly” (74), not to

participate directly, in the romantic-heroic way these teenagers had hoped. Samad wanted to capture the Nazi doctor

Marc-Pierre Perret, a.k.a. Dr. Sick, as part of his desire to be on the side of resistance against evil like his

grandfather, Mangal Pande, who, by Samad’s account, fired the first shot in the 1857 Sepoy rebellion. By this point,

Archie idolizes the smart, educated Samad and follows on the great charge to capture the Nazi. Samad’s brave

charge gives way to despair, when he “saw where he was at the farewell party for the end of Europe and he longed

for the East” (94). At the same moment, he realized his twin troubles, that in him East and West were forever linked

but that he belonged nowhere, at the brink of the collapse of the English empire. “‘What am I going to do?’ he

demanded of Archie, ‘Go back to Bengal? Or to Delhi? Who would have such an Englishman there? To England?

Who would have such an Indian? They promise us independence in exchange for the men we were. But it is a

devilish deal’” (95). At this moment, suicide seems like the only way out of this twin dilemma, framed as a

peculiarly masculine one at the beginning of the end of empire, late in the reign of modernity.

Modernity replaced faith with science, and put the scientist in the throne once reserved for god. In many

ways liberating, modernity also closed doors on symbolic thinking, on metaphoric and interpretive understanding,

on inspiration, emotion, and the sacred. In the first one hundred years of the scientific revolution, the Catholic

Church was mostly able to accept the work of the new scientists, assuming any contradiction with scripture,

including Copernicus’ heliocentric model, indicated scriptural misinterpretation. They were able to be flexible at

least on this count, and reinterpret a text that was seen allegorically. Ironically, it was the Protestant Reformation

that helped to undermine this give and take relationship between science and religion. Luther’s reformation was on

one hand profoundly forward-looking—he exposed church corruption and the economic burdens it placed on the

poor. At the same time, it was profoundly reactionary, condemning Greek influence on Renaissance life as pagan

and heretical. One of the results of the reformation, then, was the disenchantment of nature, and the modern view

that bodies, human and natural, are inert matter over which people can dominate. Although anti-science himself,

Luther’s disenchantment of nature opened the door for modern science.

Luther’s insistence on literal interpretation of scripture condemned the scientists as heretics, and Luther

called Copernicus an “upstart astrologer” (Tarnas 252). It was because of protestant challenges that the early modern

Catholic Church ultimately began to insist upon literal truth of scripture. It was then that the Inquisition most

fiercely focused its wrath on scientists. One of the formative forces of modernity, the Protestant Reformation began

as an anti-scientific movement. But, as modernity developed, Luther’s insistence on literal truth was also the

scientists’—not in regard to scripture, but in regard to reading the text of nature. Luther insisted on stripping away

any mythical interpretation of the Bible, on stripping away anything but the absolute monotheism of the early

church. With no need for priestly intervention or interpretation, Luther saw people as essentially sinful and on their

own before a judgmental god with the literally true scripture for guidance. Out of these fundamentally religious

tenants came increased secularism, as religion became more and more private. Luther’s literal religion shaped

secular, scientific modernity, itself often rigid and unbending.

In the twentieth century, it was American Protestants who first used the word “‘fundamentalist’ to signify

their desire [like Luther’s in the sixteenth century] to go back to basics and reemphasize the ‘fundamentals’ of the

Christian tradition which they identified with a literal interpretation of Scripture and the acceptance of certain core

doctrines” (Armstrong xii). The connection of these American fundamentalists to modernity is as ironic as Martin

Luther’s at the beginning of the Reformation, at the birth of modernity. Seeking to flee the secular, scientific world

of modernity, they made the same move as Luther did, trying to reform a church that was adjusting its readings of

scripture to accommodate the science Luther’s work ultimately facilitated in a secular society he ultimately helped

to shape.

Other forms of fundamentalism are also linked with the very modernity they often revile, not only as

opposing sides in a battle, but often adopting some modernist ideology as part of the struggle. As historian of

this original usage, and she concludes that, although not perfect, the term is widely used enough that it makes sense

to keep using it. She also concludes that, despite their differences, a variety of forms of fundamentalisms share a

‘family resemblance.’ [Following Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby], she defines fundamentalism as:

embattled forms of spirituality, which have emerged as a response to a perceived crisis. They are engaged

in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself.

Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic

war between the forces of good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identity

by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they

often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical

dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under their charismatic leaders,

they refine these ‘fundamentals’ so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action.

(xiii)

Despite her undertone of cheerleading for modernity (she praises its emphasis on ‘progress’ without

critiquing accompanying losses to cultures, the environment, to the aesthetic; she uncritically links the terms

‘enlightened and tolerant’ to describe modernity), Armstrong makes an important connection between modernity

and fundamentalism. While often experiencing modernity as an assault, twentieth and twenty-first century

fundamentalisms, “have a symbiotic relationship with modernity” (xiii), because modernity has shaped and touched

cultures the world over. Modernity, too, is Promethean and heroic; fundamentalism often is as well. Assault and

counter assault, modernity and fundamentalism are twin trouble in Smith’s novel. She presents neither side as all

right or all wrong, but when they do finally meet in a battle of sorts, even to death, there are no winners either.

At the end of WWII, Samad and Archie have a sense that there are no winners. Samad is suicidal over the

struggle of east and west in him. Archie is there. Young, ingenuous, awe-struck, working class, not formallyeducated,

white, English Archie. Bumbling Archie trying to save his friend. Samad, young, worldly, educated,

affluent, despairing, Bengali, English Samad. Samad longs to be a hero in the fight against evil. With the Nazi

doctor theirs (Samad won him in a poker game from the Russian soldiers who were supposed to arrest him), Samad

insists he and Archie have to kill him as a kind of atonement for ‘missing’ the war. Samad thinks blood on his hands

will wash him clean of the dual dilemma tearing him in half. Using Samad’s own logic against him to try to save

Samad’s life and to avoid him killing Dr. Perret, Archie says, “‘But you said that was nothing to do with you. Not

your argument. . . . If anyone’s got a score to settle it’d probably have to be me. It’s England’s future we’ve been

fighting for. For England. You know . . . democracy and Sunday dinner, and . . . and . . . promenades and piers, and

bangers and mash and things that are ours. Not yours’” (100). A much quicker wit, Samad agrees with Archie’s

uncharacteristic patriotism, and sends him out to kill the Nazi, saying, “‘Jones, it is simply a question of what you

will do when the chips are down. . . . I want to know what kind of a man you are, Jones’” (101). For it is a question

of manhood, this patriotism, this desire for heroism and blood on one’s hands. These twin troubles, modernity and

fundamentalism, west and east, empire and its demise, often come down to conversations among men, men as

unlikely as Archie and Samad, who thinks Archie stands for nothing, “‘not for a faith, not for a politics. Not even for

your country. How your lot ever conquered my lot is a bloody mystery’” (101).

Much of the world is a mystery to Archie, the Joneses in peacetime, like the buggered battalion in the war,

not part of the ‘action’ of England. Archie thinks the Joneses, like the Smiths of the world, are “chaff” (84). Their

job is to keep England running smoothly so others, the middle class and affluent, can live out their important and

exciting lives without having to worry about mundane everyday necessities. His preferred method of decisionmaking

is the coin toss, a method he employs 30 years later even to decide on his own suicide. So, when Archie

marches Dr. Perret out into the night and comes back bleeding and limping, it is not clear what has transpired. But,

when the chips are down, when someone for whom he cares is in trouble, Archie does not equivocate. When Samad

is about to be humiliated or, worse, pitied, the regiment of Russian soldiers stumbling upon the suicidal Samad, gun

in his mouth, Samad says he is cleaning the weapon. Archie, not missing a beat, no coin needed, explains, “‘that’s

how they do it in Bengal’” (96).

Nearly forty years later, in London, Samad and Archie are best friends. Samad is still split, still haunted by

the twin trouble he hasn’t been able to shake or replace with a less wrenching alternative. Obsessed with his sons’

red-headed music teacher, Samad turns to the Islam he has never truly believed (in the war, he told Archie he lacked

the ability to be religious) and turns to the logic of Archie’s England. His twin trouble is now revealed in the phrases

“to the pure all things are pure” and “can’t say fairer than that” (115). He tries to justify his extramarital longings

and how he takes matters into his one good hand with his logic that if he is ‘pure,’ all of his actions are also pure.

When that doesn’t work, he tries bargaining with God, vowing to give up one so-called vice if he can practice

another (can’t say fairer than that). “But of course he was in the wrong religion for compromises, deals, pacts,

His God was not like that charming white-bearded bungler of the Anglican, Methodist, or Catholic churches. His

visits his guilt on his sons, tearing them apart, kidnapping the elder by two minutes, Magid, and sending him to be

raised in Bengal. Instead of bringing him peace, Samad’s action brings him only more misery as his twins embody

the troubles Samad faces, as his wife refuses to speak directly to him for eight years so that he will feel the

uncertainty she feels every day her son is gone.

After eight years, Magid comes back from Bengal more English than the English, a young scientist who

wants to study English law to help the former colonies become English-civilized. Millat, raised in England, has a

split-level subconscious (366) like his father and lives with one foot in Willesden, the other in Bengal. He first joins

the Raggastanis and then the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, a Muslim fundamentalist group

with an acronym problem. Millat wants to be a hero in the fight against evil, like Samad, like Mangal Pande. But

mostly, Millat wants to belong; he likes the uniform (green bow tie), he likes the male embrace of the group. His

twin phrases for a new generation are “I always wanted to be a gangster,” and “I always wanted to be a Muslim”

(348-9). And he is an adolescent running from his father’s mistakes into his father’s confusion. When the twins are

finally reunited, Magid is working with Marcus Chalfen and Millat is preparing for battle against Chalfen’s

genetically engineered mouse. The twins are inseparable, even when they won’t speak to each other, identical genes

and two sides of the same dilemma binding them, one on either side of a two-way mirror, each reflecting the other in

a dance of mutual destruction.

III. Mirror, Mirror

Neither twin can look at himself in the mirror that is England and find a reflection that is not terribly

distorted. Although they are British, they are still facing the England George Orwell defined in 1941 in “England,

Your England.” In Orwell’s words:

The British needed neither to learn from, nor be subject to, other people’s decidedly inferior cultures.

Britain was mature and fully formed. British influence upon others was the norm; after all, was there not an

Empire to prove this? (qtd. in Phillips 266-7)

In the decades after the British Empire began to crumble, immigrants began arriving from Pakistan, Bangladesh and

India. Immigrants began arriving from the Caribbean. Hundreds of thousands of them arrived, and they were

“British and had come to help” (Phillips 271). While whites of non-British ethnicity (Jews, Catholics, Eastern

Europeans) were earlier excluded based on ethnicity from full participation in English society, they were given

white status in the 1950s and 60s in an attempt to exclude Caribbean immigrants (and Southeast Asians as well),

who were often “uncomfortably and surprisingly British . . . based on physiology” (Phillips 273).

So Joyce Chalfen nee Connor, an Irish Catholic, and Marcus Chalfen, nee Chalfenovsky, an Eastern

European Jew, could be English in England, could see themselves reflected in its mirror, only in the last fifty years

and as part of an attempt to exclude the Samads and Iries, Alsanas and Claras, Hortenses and Neenas, Magids and

Millats of the world. When Millat looked into the mirror of England that is television, he never saw a man like

himself, unless the man was a murder victim or a criminal. “He knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the

country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat [and his Raggastani crew] were on every

channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it

recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands” (Smith 194). Maybe it is no surprise, then, that Magid could be

English in Bengal, but Millat could not be in England. Maybe it is no surprise that Magid had his friends calling him

Mark Smith in the years before he was ripped from his mother and brother.

could never be a British man” (273). In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher repolished the mirror, and the “keep Britain

white” political slogan of the 1950s was replaced with advertisements featuring suave Black men in elegant business

suits and the slogan “‘Labor says he’s black, Tories say he’s British.’ Suddenly there were to be acceptable ‘aliens,’

such as profitable Asian businessmen and upwardly mobile black men in suits, which meant there would also be

unacceptable ‘aliens,’ presumably those who still had the temerity to go to the mosque or wear dreadlocks.

However, Mrs Thatcher’s new idea of British nationality, with its dependency on economic virility and on codes of

behaviour, was clearly to be culturally and not racially constructed” (278). So, Samad and Alsana, a waiter and a

seamstress, and their two sons, were not to be ‘acceptable,’ that is, until Magid, more British than the British,

returned from the east to London, where Marcus Chalfen adopted him as protégé, as acceptable, as someone who

could look into the mirror of England and see himself reflected.

Surprisingly, in his 2001 book, Phillips, offers no critique of the masculinity central to each of these

constructions of race, ethnicity and economically virile Brits. So it is not surprising that he also credits young men of

color with “kicking back when kicked, and therefore kicking open doors long closed” (276). It is not surprising that

only Millat’s story, if it were only Samad’s story or if it were only KEVIN’s story, we might see Phillips’ twentyfirst

century analysis of race in Britain reflected clearly. But Smith tells a broader story, she holds up multiple

mirrors, shows multiple absences. For Irie Jones also looks into the mirror of England and sees nothing. In her High

School English class, she thinks she might see a glimpse of herself in an Elizabethan sonnet written to a woman with

Black hair like wires and skin described also as Black (Smith 224-5). Love itself is called Black in the poem, and

Irie, for once, is eager to discuss poetry in class (222). But the teacher quickly turns the mirror away, explaining to

Irie that there were no “Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at the time . . . and never to read what is old with a modern

ear” (227).

Irie looks into the mirror that is England and sees nothing. She sees her Jamaican body “loaded with

pineapples, mangoes and guavas” (221); she sees her hair and hates what she sees. Instead of acting out, like Millat

does, Irie acts in. Despite Clara’s, “Irie, my love, you’re fine—you’re just built like an honest-to-God

Bowden—don’t you know you’re fine? Irie didn’t know she was fine” (222). She diets, she corsets herself, she holds

her breath. She does not go to public book burnings, but she goes to the beauty parlor to have her hair straightened,

only to have it burned off. The men’s side of the shop “was all laughter, all talk, all play, . . . [but] the female section

. . . was a deathly thing” (229) each woman waging war against her own body in hopes of forcing a reflection for

herself in the mirror of England. Irie has the additional hope that Millat will love her if her hair is straight and red.

Drowning in the reflectionless sea of England, she hopes a man will rescue her by someone else’s hair. But Neena

and Maxine are there to pull her to the surface, to offer her a reflection. To Irie, Neena says, “‘The Afro was cool,

man. It was wicked. It was yours’” (237).

Irie’s great-grandmother, Ambrosia Bowden, understood better than Phillips that racism is also directed at

women, but not always in the same public ways as it is directed at men. Irie’s great-grandfather was a white man,

Captain Charlie Durham, who educated Ambrosia in letters and math, in botany and anatomy, and left her while

Hortense was a bump in her belly, his play on words “a maid no more, Ambrosia, a maid no more” (296) ringing in

her ears like slaps. Every Bowden woman learned the danger of “a little English education” from that “no-good

djam fool bwoy” (294), the one who tried to come back to marry Ambrosia, to take her away, but who was thwarted

by the earthquake during which Hortense was born. The ship’s captain said there was no room for “black whores or

livestock” (301) on his ship, even as Durham protested that he loved her and would marry her. “And he did love her,

just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland” (299).

Racism plays itself out on the bodies and souls of women of color. At the Chalfen’s, inspecting the family

that has both given so much to and taken so much from Irie, Clara lies when Joyce asks where she thinks Irie gets

her intelligence. Knowing that the Bowdens are much smarter than Captain Charlie Durham, Clara’s grandfather,

Clara lies, saying “it was probably Captain Charlie Durham. He taught my grandmother all she knew. A good

English education” (294). Even Clara directs her pain and anger at Joyce’s racism inward, telling lies that Clara felt

as an assault against herself, initiated by Joyce’s insistence that genetics is the better half of intelligence, an English

education making up the rest. But Clara knew it “was a downright lie. False as her own white teeth” (294). And

Joyce is not as smart as the Bowdens either; like Charlie Durham, she sacrificed people she hardly knew for her own

misguided love.

The Chalfens, middle class, assimilated to Anglo, look into the mirror of England, and see themselves, both

in terms of the white status they were given precisely in order to exclude the likes of Irie and Millat and in terms of

economic class. The Chalfens helped to keep England white and to keep England economically virile. The Chalfens

thought of themselves, the middle class, as inheritors of the Enlightenment (359), and they are proudly and solidly

modern, science their arbiter of truth in both the physical universe and the political arena. To their credit, they live

their politics, sending their children to public schools. They live their Chalfenist lives perfectly, and when they look

into the mirror of England, they see themselves reflected back. But, like modernity at the end of the twentieth

century, there were cracks in Chalfen bliss:

The century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner

table was an exercise in mirrored perfection. Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely,

bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin, Benjamin to Jack

ad nauseam across the meat and veg. . . . They were bored, and none more than Joyce. . . . Joyce needed to

be needed, [and so] it was when she finished breast-feeding Oscar that she threw herself back into

gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her. (262)

When Irie and Millat are busted along with Josh Chalfen in a schoolyard drug raid and are assigned as a

result to after school study at the middle-class, white Chalfens, science nerd Josh Chalfen is delighted by his rise in

status to ‘cool’. But when Joyce first met Irie and Millat, she had just come in from the garden where she was

ruthlessly pruning her delphinium, pruning it back for its own good, so it could grow again free from the thrips now

eating it from the inside. She “looked at Irie and Millat the way she had looked at her . . . delphinium. She was a

quick and experienced detector of illness, and there was damage here” (269). But the Chalfens love Irie and Millat

like England loves India, like England loves Jamaica. Assimilated themselves, the Chalfens, like England, think of

themselves as mature and fully formed, having something to give to these brown strangers, but never expecting to be

changed themselves.

IV. Creating Gardens of Diversity

experience. She writes:

If it is not too far-fetched a comparison, the sexual and cultural revolution we have experienced these last

two decades is not a million miles away from the horticultural revolution that has taken place in our

herbaceous borders and sunken beds. Where once we were satisfied with our biennials . . ., now we are

demanding both variety and continuity 365 days a year. . . . The birds and the bees, the thick haze of

pollen-these are all to be encouraged! Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certain of the two

fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeating the same parental

strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out

by a single evolutionary event. . . . The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring, which are

better able to cope with a changed environment. It is said cross-pollinating plants also tend to produce more

and better-quality seeds. . . . Sisters, the bottom line is this: if we are to continue wearing flowers in our

hair into the next decade, they must be hardy and ever at hand, something only a truly mothering gardener

can ensure. If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our

husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even

she requires the occasional helping hand! (257-8)

The concept of hybridity has long been part of postcolonial studies and of philosophies of race and racism.

And Smith shows the strengths of the concept along with its pitfalls. For Joyce means well, her instincts are right.

Josh and Irie and Millat are products of cultural and genetic mixing and they are in the process of defining a future

of coexistence, of cultural crossing and of the shared forging of an England their parents cannot even imagine.

Theirs is

the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. . . . It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a

playground and find Isaac Leung by the fishpond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke

bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct

collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals,

medical checkups. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best

friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the

name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best—less trouble). Yet, despite all the mixing up,

despite the fact that we have slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort. . .

this is no easy hybridity, no easy, happy multiculturalism, no innocently blooming garden of diversity (271). Sita’s

mother had the option of Sita—to choose the name because it pleased her, new and pretty; Sharon’s mother picked

Sharon to shield her daughter, to make things easier for her daughter in a country where Pakistani names might be

picked like jewels for white girls, and Pakistani kids still have need of shields.

For Joyce, cross-pollination and diversity are, like brightly-colored blooms in her garden, resources to

brighten up her life, to educate her children, to nourish her husband. Joyce is willing to use Irie and Millat (and her

project of rescuing them from what she perceives to be troubled home lives) to make herself feel needed in her white

female role as reproducer of Chalfenism, of white England, where a Black man can be accepted if he is

economically virile enough. Joyce’s version of hybridity is a neocolonial one: the empire was always willing to

profit at the expense of Black and Asian labor and on the bodies of Black and Asian women and men. Like the thrips

she was facing down in the delphinium, Joyce means “well, but [she and] thrips go too far, thrips go beyond

pollinating and eating pests; thrips begin to eat the plant itself, to eat it from within” (263).

And, though the Chalfens have no friends and are completely self-referential, Joyce is as spellbound by

Millat’s beauty as she is by her desire to ‘save’ the children, to have them need her, to shape them into Chalfens. She

thinks to herself that Millat “should have been indistinguishable to [her] from those she regularly bought milk and

bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her checkbook to behind the thick glass of a bank till”

(264). He should have been one flower among many in her garden, indistinguishable from the others there for her

benefit, but he stood out, a rare, solitary and beautiful flower. And immediately, Joyce turns her fascination into

genetic and social information for Irie, advising her to seek “‘a man like Marcus for the long term. These fly-bynights

are all right for fun, but what kind of fathers do they make?’” (265). Again, Joyce’s interest in crosspollination

and hybridity reflects no real desire to let her flowers change her, to become hybridized herself through

cultural interaction with Millat and Irie or with their families, the families Joyce assumes are essentially damaged.

She cannot see her young guests as English, remarking, “‘you look very exotic. Where are you from?’” ‘Willesden,’

said Irie and Millat simultaneously. ‘Yes, yes, of course, but where originally?’ ‘Oh,’ said Millat, putting on what he

originally.’ ‘Whitechapel,’ said Millat, pulling out a fag. ‘Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus’” (265).

Full of stereotypes and her own self-importance, a self-importance itself a reflection of Marcus Chalfen’s glory,

Joyce is hardly aware the Millat is making fun of her, her laughter an obedient imitation of her husband’s and sons’.

Although she seems unconscious of it, Joyce is a living example of one of hybridity’s possible downfalls. She has

assimilated entirely to Chalfenism, become entirely English. An assimilated white English woman, she has also

devoted herself to the needs of children and husband, needing to be needed, and not recognizing that, in her need,

she needs Irie and Millat. And they will change her whether she intends to be changed or no, perhaps even

threatening Chalfenism’s single-strained, inbred existence.

colonial or postcolonial, is through an amalgam of the cultures of all involved. He asks, “So how should Britain

define itself as a nation? A synthesis of Indian takeaways, baked beans, soccer, Jamaican patties, St. Patrick’s Day,

pub on Saturday, Notting Hill Carnival, church on Sunday, mosque on Friday and fish and chips? I say

emphatically, yes” (281). And this hybridity seems like a good solution. There is no easy cultural ‘purity,’ as Alsana

makes vividly clear to Samad in his postcolonial dilemma, pulling out the encyclopedia BALTIC-BRAIN volume to

show him the ethnic admixture of the inhabitants of Bangladesh (Smith 196). But while she insists “‘you go back

and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on

the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It’s a fairy tale!’” (196), she and Clara also worry, as

immigrants do, about disappearing, about their children being “swept away in a sea of pink” (272).

There is the danger, also, that this hybridity turns into meaningless capitalist sampling, such as in the

restaurant where Samad works, ignored or belittled by arrogant customers, who can’t pronounce the names of the

dishes that do not even exist in India. Or, pointedly excluding Archie and Clara from the company dinner because

Clara is Black, Kelvin Hero, Archie’s boss, mentions that curry will be on the menu. Archie is excluded, because he

married a woman from the Caribbean; Archie is excluded because he has Bengali friends and talks to Pakistanis just

like they were ordinary people, and brings Indian sweets to celebrate Clara’s pregnancy. Curry is the invited guest of

honor, while Clara and Archie are left out.

Desperately wanting to be guest of honor somewhere, Millat makes the evening news with his Raggastani

crew the day they burn a so-called blasphemous book they’d none of them read. These young teenage boys want a

place to fit in, and they get it through homophobic, crude, violent action. Trying to blast their way onto the English

landscape, they, fittingly, come dressed in Nike gear from head to toe, the lot of them moving in unison, in “one

gigantic swoosh, one huge mark of corporate approval” (193).

V. At the Root: Fundamentals and Fundamentalism

Smith neither neatly condemns any one of these characters nor holds anyone up as having the answer, the

only way out. She does suggest, however, that, although there are unacceptable behaviors aplenty, there are also

likely multiple practices that could lead out of modernist/fundamentalist, colonial/postcolonial binds. She does not

shine a light on the clear path out, for that would undermine the more fluid, more improvised approaches of some of

her most flexible and determined characters.

Not going back to a ‘pure’ source, Smith still goes to the fundamentals, goes to the root. For all of her

characters have the anguish of history somewhere at the root of their beings. They have all suffered historical root

canals of some sort, their histories being deadened, their bodies the sites of battles and scars and forced pregnancies and

disappearances. Even the Chalfens have lost in their assimilation to whiteness; even the insufferably racist Mr. J.P.

Hamilton, the old, gnarled white British army officer, who used the whiteness of their teeth as a beacon to illuminate

his murder of Blacks in the Congo, has lost his teeth. His imperial England is, fortunately, in its death throes.

December 31, 1992, England got down to the fundamentals. On this New Year’s Eve, Marcus Chalfen, under

the sponsorship of the Perret Institute, and with the collaboration of Magid Iqbal, will launch the FutureMouse project.

The little brown mouse has been genetically altered to live twice as long as an ordinary mouse, but to develop cancer

seven years hence which Chalfen can then study in an attempt to find a cure for cancer. Chalfen fundamentally wants to

give Mother Nature the helping hand Joyce mentioned in The New Flower Power. He wants to breed out the random in

nature for the benefit of humanity. Fundamentally, he is the Promethean modern scientist, shining Enlightenment

Reason on nature and politics.

All of the groups who come to the event to challenge Chalfen, all of the individuals who come, have

fundamental reasons for their interest in or opposition to the project. Some of them are also fundamentalists. Smith

offers two definitions:

fundamental 1. Of or pertaining to the basis or groundwork; going to the root of the matter. 2. Serving as the

base or foundation; essential or indispensable. Also, primary, original; from which others are

derived. 3. Of or pertaining to the foundation(s) of a building. 4. Of a stratum: lowest, lying at the

bottom.

fundamentalism: The strict maintenance of traditional orthodox religious beliefs or doctrines; esp. belief in the

inerrancy of religious texts. (241)

Although Smith never says so directly, she presents many of the characters and their religious, political, or

scientific projects as fundamentalist, expanding the definition even beyond Karen Armstrong’s to include people or

groups who hold their fundamental principles with religious fervor, who are rigid and unyielding, who separate from

the rest of society to maintain a kind of purity, and who, ultimately end up in twin trouble with the very forces they

represent or oppose. Hortense’s Jehovah’s Witnesses and their belief in the literal truth of scripture fit the most

narrow of the definitions, but KEVIN, with its veneer of unbending Islamic rules and proscriptions over a program

of political action fits Armstrong’s expanded definition. FATE, the radical animal rights group, which Josh Chalfen

has recently joined, although claiming no religious affiliation at all, might still be seen as fundamentalist, in its rigid,

unbending adherence to fundamental principles. The Chalfens, too, might be considered fundamentalist, if we look

at their own self-referential Chalfenism as their source and sacred text. Nothing else ever measures up, and they

have retreated from the rest of the world in their presumed superiority. Finally, Marcus Chalfen’s scientific work on

FutureMouse, may too fall into the fundamentalist category, his unbending belief in science described by Romantics

as “a jealous monotheism in new clothes, wanting no other gods before it” (369).

But Smith shows us the reasons each believes as he or she does. Each, in one way or another, wants to

weed out the random, to make life more safe, more bearable, more predictable, more accepting. For Hortense, like

Ambrosia before her, the Jehovah’s Witnesses represented freedom from the English men who had done them such

harm. From the day of Hortense’s birth, “no Bowden woman took lessons from anyone but the Lord” (301). For

Millat, KEVIN was a mirror and haven. For Halaal butcher, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, frequent victim of racist attacks,

KEVIN was an army of resistance. He joined KEVIN after his Irish wife left him and he felt emasculated. For Shiva,

the Hindu waiter, KEVIN was his way to ‘be someone,’ his job as a waiter in the same Indian restaurant as Samad

pulling away at his self-image. For him, the best result of KEVIN was increased attention from women. FATE

offered Josh Chalfen a way to spite his father, who seemed more interested in Magid and the mouse than in his son.

Chalfen hopes to find cures for fatal human diseases.

Smith allows the reader both to sympathize with the reasons each character takes the path he or she does

and also to understand the limits of such paths. Each wants to eliminate what seem to be random racist and/or sexist

attacks or to eliminate what seem to be random diseases or misfortunes. Each wants to make the world more livable,

but each is also rigid and narrowly focused. The only entirely sinister character in the novel is Dr. Marc-Pierre

Perret, former Nazi scientist. He offers a frightening counterpoint to the others precisely because he also wants to

weed out the random through eugenics, through the creation of a master race.

This weeding out of the random is what Samad wanted, too, as he tried to deal with his twin troubles, and,

as a result, heaped trouble on his twins. KEVIN, with its list of rules and its tough talk and confrontational action

wants to rip out the random attacks, the random invisibilities, the random loneliness each of its members face.

Hortense’s religion is a firm foundation, a place of freedom with its rules and scripture verses for all occasions.

Marcus Chalfen’s work, too, is precisely about eliminating the random (283), as are Joyce’s horticultural and social

interventions. Irie herself at first wants to merge with the Chalfens, to escape “the chaotic, random flesh of her own

family” (284).

But beyond attempts even at weeding out the random, each of these fundamentalists also lacks “the cardinal

insight of all the major confessional faiths. . . : no religious doctrine or practice can be authentic if it does not lead to

practical compassion. Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and monotheists all agree that the sacred reality is not simply

transcendent, ‘out there,’ but is enshrined in every single human being, who must, therefore, be treated with absolute

honor and respect” (Armstrong 322). Even Josh Chalfen is skeptical about FATE’s plan to use him as a hostage to

manipulate his father into acceding to their demands, not sure his father has the compassion for his son to choose

him over the mouse. Even Irie Jones is unable to feel compassion for her mother, when, upon being bitten by her

mother’s false teeth, runs to her grandmother Hortense to escape her parents’ painful histories, both wanting those

histories to vanish and blaming her parents when they push into the present.

Going back to the beginning, to another New Year’s Eve, Archie is about to commit suicide. Archie’s

despair might be read as modernity despairing. The promises of modernity went unfulfilled for Archie. The promise

that if a person works hard, he or she will be rewarded: failed. The promise that if a young man fights for his

country, he will be a hero: failed. The promise that military service will attract a beautiful woman and a life of

the record books: failed. The promises of masculinity, capitalism, the protestant work ethic, the military, athletic

heroism, the promises of certainty, the random weeded out: all failed. So Archie flips a coin, and decides to die. This

man, broken by the failed promises of modernity, awakes into a postcolonial, multicultural world. Mo Hussein-

Ishmael raps on Archie’s window, saying he cannot die in front of the butcher shop, and Archie gulps in fresh air

and the idea that life chose him. In his elation, he drives until he stumbles randomly upon the ‘End of the World’

party and is at the bottom of the stairs the moment Clara Bowden appears in her elegant beauty at the top. Six weeks

later they married; within the year Irie came along. By the end of the novel, Irie, her father’s daughter, begins to

recognize the random, not as an enemy. It sounded “like paradise to her. Sounded like freedom” (337).

VI. In the End

In the end, we must go back to the beginning, to Samad’s question what will Archie do when the chips are

down? A friendship that began as the kind an Englishman can only have on holiday, turned out to be the most

enduring relationship of Archie’s life. When the chips are down, Archie spares the same Nazi scientist twice, not for

the value of that man’s life, but to save Samad’s son from the vengeance of the English legal system. When the

chips are down, Archie throws himself in front of a bullet Millat intended for Marcus or for Dr. Perret. Archie took

the bullet, not for Dr. Sick’s sake or for Marcus’ but for Millat’s. He took the bullet for friendship and for his

friend’s teenage son. Without flipping a coin, without a moment’s hesitation, Archie does what he must,

fundamentally. In the chaos, FutureMouse escapes, and Archie cheers him on, thinking “go on my son!” (448).

Recognizing that, for a culture in flux, the chips are always down, Neena and Irie work on culture at the

level of fundamentals. They, at the supposed bottom of the heap, shift the foundations, and so can’t help but to shift

proudly a Begum willing to support and defend her cousins and Irie, is at ease with the confusing multiplicities of

postcolonial London. She lives with contradictions, sorting out what is fundamentally unacceptable and breathing

with the rest. Often at odds with her aunt, Alsana, Neena is the undercover agent of the mums, Clara and Alsana,

when they are fed up with Chalfen interference. Alsana’s usual philosophy is that her son is second-generation and

can’t be just like his father, that Millat should be left to make his own mistakes. But she is not completely hands-off,

willing to tolerate everything. When Millat’s Raggastani crew participated in the public book burning, Alsana had a

bonfire roasting Millat’s most precious possessions waiting for him on his return home. She wanted him to learn

respect for other people’s things. When she begins to see the Chalfens as little English birds with ripping teeth, as

Chalfinches, she sends in Neena to find out just how much or little these birds respect her son and her family. For

the first time in her life, Neena agrees with her aunt: the Chalfens are crazy. They are full of themselves, they are

racist, they are homophobic, they are impossible.

Neena makes and repairs shoes; she often appears in a funky creation of her own, walking on supports of

her own invention. She repairs shoes for others. Shoes. Easily ignored when comfortable and supportive, screaming

for attention when painful. She works on the fundamentals: the lowest level, the most essential.

Irie, too, works on culture at the level of fundamentals. Effectively a secretary for Marcus Chalfen, she, like

Archie before her, does the work that makes Marcus’ battles possible. Magically, his papers are organized, folded

and filed, while Marcus courts Magid as partner in the so-called important business of science. Of course, secretaries

often hold all of the power, although they officially have little. Because Marcus takes her so for granted, like

writes:

Well, things are the same round here except that my files are in excellent order, thanks to Irie. You’ll like

her: she’s a bright girl and she has the most tremendous breasts . . . . Sadly, I don’t hold out much hope for

her aspirations in the field of ‘hard science,’ more specifically in my own biotechnology, which she appears

to have her heart set on . . . she’s sharp in a way, but it’s the menial work, the hard grafting, that she’s good

at—she’d make a lab assistant maybe, but she hasn’t any head for the concepts, no head at all. She could

try medicine, I suppose, but even there you need a little bit more chutzpah than she’s got . . . so it might

have to be dentistry for our Irie (she could fix her own teeth at least), an honest profession no doubt, but

one I hope you’ll be avoiding. (305)

Understandably upset, Irie soon decides that she will become a dentist after all. Like her father and mother,

she is “a great reinventor of herself. A great make-doer” (305). But Irie is not simply settling; she’s getting down to

fundamentals. In a book filled with false teeth and deception and the agonizing wounds of history, Irie will work on

the fundamentals, on the teeth that shape a person’s face, that make speaking and eating possible. She’ll work on

teeth, on the white teeth common to all humans, teeth, that, like shoes, are taken for granted, ignored, but relied

upon, when they do not hurt. She’ll work on teeth that scream for attention when they do.

Dentistry, of course, is also symbolic of the fundamental cultural work Irie, like Neena, does. When Irie,

against her better judgment, facilitates a meeting between the twins, she ends up first in the desperate arms of Millat

and then in the maddeningly serene arms of Magid. She wants Magid, the elder twin by two minutes, for once to be

last, and she makes him second by 25 minutes. Out of these unions, Irie and each twin, a new Irie is born, and Irie’s

daughter is conceived. Magid tells Irie she is like a person shipwrecked, who clings to men like islands, wanting to

mark them with an X. And calmly, he says it’s a little late in the day for that (382). His kiss on her forehead feels

like a baptism, and Irie wept. For, as Neena has been saying all along, Irie is ok as she is. She doesn’t need Millat’s

love to make her strong or beautiful. Fundamentally, his love will change nothing. But fundamentally, Irie will

change everything.

No eye-witness is able to decide with certainty if it was Millat or Magid who fired the shot that fateful New

Year’s Eve, and the Chalfens, the Iqbals and Joneses were uncooperative, so the twins got 400 hours of community

service each, to be served in Joyce Chalfen’s new garden project along the banks of the Thames. Between genetics

and the practical compassion, finally, of the three families involved, the twins and the families get another chance to

make their way toward a new future. As for Irie, no one will ever know if Millat or Magid fathered her child, their

genetic makeup identical. Irie’s daughter on the way confounds modern science, confounds tradition, confounds

twin trouble. So, on New Year’s Eve, 1999, sitting with her grandmother and Josh on a Jamaican beach, her little

daughter playing nearby, Irie waits for the new year while her grandmother waits for the glorious end of the world.

This is no magical source, as elusive as one’s own shadow. But this is a beginning, connected, fundamentally to the

history that Smith says is as impossible to escape as that same shadow.

Works Cited