The 'System' of Education

Literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology. [That is, a system of specific class beliefs, images, values, and practices that functions to reproduce the dominant social order]. It has the most intimate relations to questions of social power- Terry Eagleton

When i wrote my politically charged article, "Black Statement or Writing Resistance", in March 2004, i wasn't thinking about "Truth" and the dissemination of knowledge; at least, not in the way that i think about it now. As an undergrad majoring in English Literature, i never came across teachings that dissected the canon and looked at it as a socializing tool. It is only as i read parts of Terry Eagleton's, "The Rise of English", that i came to this orgasmic realization. When i posited that "English courses perpetuate[d] my oppression" as a black female immigrant from working-class background, it was no overstatement. In fact, at times i felt as if i was going mad (with either fury or captivity, depending on the day). Speaking from my own location as racialized and socio-historically constructed being, i can easily say that each person needs a door, a way through which they can enter the world, the different worlds that are alien to them. The trouble i had rested in the fact that that door was lost to me, closed in my face, i couldn't find it. And it fucked me up quite a bit, psychologically. When that TA wrote my name on the board, in my first year, to explain to the rest of the class what/who race was, it fucked me up quite a bit. The door was closed in my face when i raised my hand to ask who/what was the "object" and who/what was the "subject" and she wouldn't let me in to the meanings of those words, in to the dissonance and discord that floated around in those words. I didn't know this at the time, I only know, now, in retrospect. Apparently, as i now come to realize, ideas of race, class, gender, space, place, history, geography and the dissemination of knowledge have never left me.