Book Review: Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation by Mustafa Yunus Eryaman (ed.), Hampton Press, 2009. more

Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation, edited by Mustafa Yunus Eryaman, 2009, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, ISBN 978-1-57273-757-0, 264 pages (includes index). Reviewed by Richard Kahn, University of North Dakota When they poured across the border I was cautioned to surrender, this I could not do; I took my gun and vanished. I have changed my name so often, I have lost my wife and children but I have many friends, and some of them are with me. -- Leonard Cohen, The Partisan (Songs from a Room, 1969) Peter McLaren has turned sixty; and, per tradition for powerfully influential academics at this stage of their career, celebratory festschrifts to McLaren have likewise begun to appear. Eryaman’s book, Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation, is the second such book of collegial reflections on McLaren by fellow friends and students. It joins collaboratively with Teaching Peter McLaren: Paths of Dissent (2005), edited by Marc Pruyn and Luis Huerta-Charles, and updates that earlier book with critical comments on McLaren’s latest ideas about the relationship between revolution and education, his internationalist activities in Venezuela (and elsewhere), as well as on the meaning of recent attacks on McLaren such as his now infamous headliner inclusion in a Dirty Thirty list of radical UCLA professors made by a McCarthyite smear group formed by one of David Horowitz’s protégés. This latter episode is reflected upon by a number of the essays in the book, which collectively serve to make the point that from McLaren’s perspective such academic repression demands both moral outrage and counterhegemonic response. In particular, one tactic that seems quintessentially McLarenesque is to refuse to flee from those that would silence him. Rather than ignore his enemies’ vitriol, McLaren’s way has in fact often been to courageously assist with the propagation and widespread distribution of such attacks, transforming them into a means by which to deliver critical interventions on the reactionary aspects of today’s politics of education and to organize oppositional forces, while also strategically underlining for others that such critiques and opposition as he produces must possess significant emancipatory potentials to have engendered such aggressive resistance. In other words, he must be particularly dangerous to those who call him a danger to society (pp. 161-62). As a result, McLaren flaunts that which is extraordinary about his image with bravado, alternatively figuring himself as a ‘60sstyled countercultural hipster and bohemian, Freirian “bad boy,” Che admirer, radical Marxist scholar of world renown, and revolutionary socialist of the barricades (the list could and should go on). In this manner, McLaren’s very iconicity as a political target becomes re-integrated into a critically performative pedagogy that is at once an attempt to articulate a subversive symbolic rhetoric in service of political action for freedom as well as an invocation of his own creative, inventive, and imaginative teaching-as-living (see p. 218). Such iconicity as just outlined could doubtlessly serve the masters of capital too, even when intended as a media counter-spectacle: Hollywood loves rebels with causes as without in near equal measure. But, in his opening chapter, Samuel Fassbinder raises the provocative point that “society is full of icons” that we constantly fetishize, particularly money – with its own presidential and federal iconography emblazoned upon it; the American flag; the twin towers and the pentagon (p. 14). Thus, we can hardly afford as critical educators to turn our attention away from the power of icons in our lives. Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation argues that we must problematize and destabilize them instead, raise robust discussion about their historicity and produce inspiring alternatives. To this end, the book deploys various portraits throughout the text, not only of McLaren himself, but also of famous activists and insurrectionaries pictured by the revolutionary artist Erin Currier. Additionally, it includes a full chapter by Michael Viola (pp. 169-86) on how Filipino painter Papo de Asis embodied revolutionary critical pedagogy through his anti-imperialist pictorials along with his organization of the country’s art students to create a wide range of murals, banners, and paintings in contestation of the Marcos dictatorship throughout the 1970s and 80s. Of course, transformative critical projects are clearly undermined if they are allowed in the process of finding such alternatives to descend into a form of authoritarian cult of personality. As the essays from Gregory Martin and David Gabbard in this collection highlight, McLaren’s style has also generated a host of fears by some on the left in this context. Each of the essays quotes at length from a previous piece by Alipio Casali and Ana Maria Araujo Freire from Teaching Peter McLaren. While Casali and Freire ultimately conclude that first appearances give way to the realization of McLaren as a complex scholar-activist whose array of representations aim at sharpness and truth, they acknowledge that “it is impossible not to notice Peter in the middle of the crowd, much as it is impossible not to be completely drawn in by his image: the extravagance of his mode of dress, his disheveled hair, his tattoos, his quick sudden gestures, his attentive manner and luminous aura” (in Pruyn & Huerta-Charles, 2005, p. 21). Gabbard confesses to having been thus drawn in himself and thereby made uncomfortable by McLaren, though perhaps not so much for his dress as for his stunning productivity, and Gabbard notes how the critical educator Antonia Darder has spoken of how she once harbored biases that colored her own feelings towards McLaren too (p. 128). For his part, Martin additionally describes how McLaren’s appearance, style of speech, and supposedly mystical aura were the target of what, he believes, was a similarly prejudiced critique by the radical educator Bill Ayers in 2006 (p. 91). Most recently, the subject of McLaren’s aesthetics has again come under fire. Despite finding liberatory aspects in McLaren’s performative voice that are much needed in an educational research climate choking to death in positivism and neoliberalism, the critical theorist Tyson Lewis (2009) voices his worry that McLaren’s students may become mere hypnotic lovers of his image and that this unwittingly reproduces the conditions for a fascistic society such as McLaren’s work condemns. I am sensitive to Lewis’s concern, but we might wonder how far we are to take this – is now this festschrift itself an anti-democratic and non-critical exercise that for all its posture really only reinforces the status quo? There are always contradictions, but I think not. Rather Eryaman’s book on McLaren valuably helps to refute Lewis on this matter by founding a new series of McLaren studies that demonstrate how his work does reflect a “poetics that is paedagogical (that shows itself showing), that demystifies its own construction and recognizes the commodification potential in the performance of all representation” (Lewis, 2009, p. 207). In closing, I should point out that my own work is not in critical aesthetics or the pedagogy of performance, though like Lewis I have studied with McLaren previously. My ongoing research is in advancing a critical ecopedagogy that appropriately responds to the unprecedented planetary ecocrisis and the species mass extinction event that is presently underway. In this respect, Peter McLaren, Education, and the Struggle for Liberation is itself iconic of an evolution in critical pedagogy that has been happily taking place over the last decade on these matters. The book’s Preface (pp. ix-xviii) is committed entirely to the need to think and enact a revolutionary critical pedagogy that can meet the challenges of a time of socio-ecological catastrophe and, in his Afterword, McLaren twice spends his academic capital in support of strengthening our efforts “in caring for the planet, and in advancing animal rights” (p. 238) as well as on behalf of the hope provided by “deep ecologists, eco-feminists, eco-socialists, and revolutionary environmentalists who teach about and fight against the destruction of the ecosystem and the statism, sexism, racism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and Eurocentrism that go hand-in-glove with Western cultural development” (p. 241). It is interesting that McLaren begins his closing remarks by thanking the book’s contributors for their “generous assessment” of his work but with a need to express that he is “not as optimistic” about either it or its influence (p. 237). Yet, how could he be? The last three decades alone have wrought unbridled transnational classism and burgeoning global poverty, the unchecked rise of American imperialism and endless war run amok, the instantiation of neoliberalism and conservative standards throughout education, and a climate change spinning perilously out of control. The nightmare of this history is as iconic for McLaren as it is for us all. In truth, McLaren is probably too harsh a self-critic, but even if revolutionary critical pedagogy of his variety symbolizes little more today than the guerrillero raging against the dying of the light of freedom, this is a primal scream worth listening to and, if so inclined, joining in voice. References Lewis, T. 2009. Review articles. Historical Materialism 17: 201-208. Pruyn, M. & L. Huerta- Charles. 2005. Teaching Peter McLaren: Paths of Dissent. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. Author Bio Richard Kahn is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations & Research at the University of North Dakota. The Chief Editor of Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy, he is the author of such forthcoming books as The Ecopedagogy Movement: Ecoliteracy, Critical Pedagogy, Planetary Crisis (Peter Lang) and Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society (Routledge). Additional information about him can be obtained at: http://und.academia.edu/RichardKahn.