safe houses versus academic ghettos

It was perhaps apropos that Canagarajah (do you suppose he goes by Professor C in his classroom?) referenced boxing in his article “Safe Houses in the Contact Zones.” (By the way, Tyson won the match via TKO in the first round). I can definitely see Canagarajah and Lisa Delpit circling each other in some Atlantic City boxing palace, gloves laced, mouth guards firmly in place.

It was interesting to read Canagarajah immediately after Delpit. Both dealt with the same basic theme: the relationship between dominant and marginalized discourses within the classroom. But they have dramatically different perspectives on this theme. While Delpit thinks that teaching students of color via their own cultural-linguistic background is tantamount to relegating them to the academic ghetto, Canagarajah argues that it is the job of the progressive, transgressive educator to support and promote these marginalized discourses and to find ways to bring them into the formal classroom discourse.

At several points in his article, Canagarajah makes points that strike, like an uppercut, at Delpit’s beliefs. On page 192 Canagarajah states that “simply acquiring the established academic/institutional discourse is not to be speak but to be silenced.” I couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t an intentional jab (to continue with the boxing metaphor) at Delpit’s “Silenced Dialogue.” On page 193 Canagarajah argues that bringing work from the safe house into the classroom “convey(s) to students that their vernacular discourses are valued academically.” Delpit might very well take the stance that they aren’t valued academically and to pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to the students. And, finally, many of Canagarajah’s strategies to legitimatize the writing done in the safe houses are suspiciously process-oriented in nature. Lisa Delpit, take that. It was interesting to me to see that Delpit was pointedly not cited in this piece.

At the end of the article, Canagarajah qualifies his stance a bit (see the paragraph that begins on page 194 and continues to page 195). Delpit, too, does this in “The Silenced Dialogue.” Both of these qualifications bring them much closer together, argument-wise, than most of their arguments would indicate, and brings to mind Don’s advice from an earlier blog post: “BALANCE, BALANCE, BALANCE.”

As a bit of a postscript, here are some clips of interest to those trying to place in context Canagarajah’s students’ cultural references:


Mike Tyson's TKO of Carl Williams:




Public Enemy doing "Fight the Power:"