SEPTEMBER 11th AND THE EMINENT PRACTICALITY OF POSTSTRUCTURALISM

Amongst academic nurses in North America, and particularly the US, poststructuralism is frequently denigrated as irrelevant jargonism — even to the point of senior professors mocking young scholars who employ it. While much of this criticism is trivial and uninformed, the events of September 11th and the interpretation of them that is driving US policy underscore the utility of poststructuralism for interrogating the political histories of our language. Although I sought a neutral vocabulary in the preceding sentence (rather than employing language of ‘terror’ and ‘tragedy’, for example), the historical frame still maintains the imperial center. Should I have started the chronology not with September 11th, but with US policy toward the Shah of Iran? Towards Palestine? In enduring anti-Semitism? The white masculine capitalist Protestantism underlying American ‘democracy’? Obviously, the answer is both yes and no. All these political commitments inform the morass we have created and struggle to understand. And there is no ‘ground zero’, no single historical moment from which to ‘begin’ a narrative. Yet the flag-waving, chest-thumping and war-mongering rhetorical response, along with weak liberal mutterings of anxiety about civil rights, have largely ignored the political commitments and histories in which September 11th is a single gesture. But poststructuralist analyses have developed more nuanced language and complex geographies for exposing and constituting political commitments entailed in wielding language such as ‘terror’, ‘tragedy’, and ‘retaliation’. Or, more importantly, for attending to issues such as who is included and excluded in the ‘we’ I designated as ‘creating and struggling to understand’. Are American Muslims part of this ‘we’? American Indians? Euro-Australians? New Zealand Maori? Similar political geographies inform each of our institutions and the languages that create and sustain them. My school of nursing may serve as both example and exception. Should a brief history of it begin with the cultural and physical genocide of the indigenous populations that ‘cleared’ the land for (white male) ‘title’ that could later be ‘gifted’ to the university? Or the implicitly and occasionally explicitly racist traditions of basic and ‘higher’ education that eventuated in an almost entirely white faculty and a student body that doesn’t approximate the ethnic diversity of our region (a calculus which itself omits how we came to have so few American Indians in ‘our’ region)? Recently our dean published a letter of apology for the school’s history of refusing to admit African-American women — so far as I know, the only such public recognition of a practice that was widespread in US schools of nursing. But such a letter, while important, leaves untouched the white supremacy of nursing education. And it is this pervasive and enduring legacy that poststructuralist vocabularies can help us articulate and resist. More unnerving are poststructuralist arguments that make it difficult to separate our nursing worlds from the histories embedded in September 11th. The ‘multiculturalist’ agenda that shapes most of academic nursing’s response to these histories can be deepened and made more complex through poststructuralist analyses. In my limited space I can make only three points: (1) the imperialist vocabulary of ethnicity; (2) the historical relativism of multiculturalism and (3) the assimilationist curricula. Imperialism and nursing’s vocabulary of ethnicity: Now that ‘science’ has caught up with history and social science, we should be able to dispense with a critique of the racist politics of racial categories. But while ethnic taxonomies escape the biological determinism of race, they are inseparable from the imperialist and colonialist projects that gave them birth. September 11th should help us remember that most ethnic and virtually all national taxonomies are the product of European-American occupation and division of the ‘other’. American efforts to characterize the demonization and bounty-hunting of Bin Laden as a ‘war’ reflects the limitations of an ethnic or nationalist vocabulary to understand the movement he has been made to ‘represent’. ‘War’ is a relationship between nation states and the multinational, multiethnic composition of Islamist struggles demonstrates the inadequacy of these languages for characterizing, much less addressing the politics they represent. Poststructuralist analyses can help us understand what we are doing when our textbooks and curricula ‘take up’ ethnic vocabularies as if they are neutral descriptors of pre-existing social organizations. What political and imperialist struggles are erased and supported when US nursing collapses contested national borders and cultural differences by using categories such as Chinese or Thai? If they are employed by Australian or Canadian or English nurses, are the erasures different? How should we find out? Nursing’s multicultural models perpetuate the same ahistoricism that ignores the histories of September 11th. By ignoring the fact that ethnic/cultural languages were developed either by or in resistance to Euro-American imperialism and racism, the unearned privileges of skin color and nationalist location are obscured and perverted into some version of ‘can’t we all get along here’. But many of ‘us’ aren’t ‘here’ in the same sense and from the same impulses as the white academicians like myself who formulate multiculturalist strategies. And those upon whom such models are to be used (African-Americans, for example) are often not part of the conversations where the models are created. Poststructural analyses have shown how these strategies reproduce dominance and maintain the purported ‘neutrality’ of the ‘scientific West’ to generate descriptions of ‘Others’. Assimilationist curricula: Finally, the ‘getting along’ of multicultural nursing education essentially means assimilation into uncriticized dominant practices. Ethnic ‘difference’ (difference from the white, class-based norms driving illness care) become raw material to be shaped into the ‘universal’ nurse. What else could result from factory-based curricular models directed toward ‘essentials’ of nursing determined by the very perspectives that now see the need of multiculturalism? Poststructuralist analyses of education, immigration policies and other acculturation practices have helped open up the political agenda behind these practices and create new possibilities for coalitions and resistance. I realize none of the issues I’ve raised here are new. The impossibility of ‘newness’ is the point — we are our histories. But there is a broad, multidisciplinary, poststructuralist literature — written from several vantage points relative to the imperial center — that offer languages less complicit with and less blind to the political histories of September 11th or nursing education. These poststructuralist analyses are often put forward by people who have suffered from these histories and offer more complex, creative and resistant possibilities for shaping our future. David Allen Health Sciences Center, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

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