Creating Anthologies And Dangerous Practices

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CREATING ANTHOLOGIES AND OTHER DANGEROUS PRACTICES
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Education
University of Auckland

The anthology as a literary form has moved a long way from its original Greek
meaning as a collection of flowers or its first literary application as a collection of
“flowersof verse.” Such an innocent and romantic imageof “flowers of verse” masks
the highly selective nature of collecting verse a nd text and of determining what is
included and excluded between the covers. The anthology has become the literary
text of cultural studies, the site of struggle about voice, authority, difference,
representation, critical dialogue, and pedagogy. As a reader, I cannot claim t o have
some systematic approach of my ownwhen contemplating an anthology and can best
describe my practice as having an “anthological” tendency toward sampling. The
idea of collection lends itself to such an unruly approach. Perhaps it is with a degree
of sympathy toward unruly tendencies that the cultural studies anthology has been
able so successfully to create the intersecting spaces for interdisciplinarity, the
auditorium formany voices, the tribunal for testimonies, the carnival of difference,
and the kitchen table where many great conversations occur and everyday revolutions are planned. However, as a reader I have also come to expect that the anthology
is connected to something a little more dangerous and enticing, an intellectual,
social, and political project that has something “at stake.” Feminist Genealogiesand
Dangerous Territories are two such examples that make claims to being more than
an innocent collection of essays.l While Feminist GeneQlOgleSis written with a
consciousness of its contribution to writing, theorizing, and organizing for women
of color, Dangerous Territories is written with the urgency of intervention not just
in what the conservative Right might be doing but in thecomfortable tendencies of
the progressive Left. They intersect in their focus on territories all marked by
relations of power. Feminist Genealogies approaches these territories through an
understanding of the genealogies that have brought us t o particular territories or
spaces and which will take us beyond them. Dangerous Territories examines the
specificities of those territories through anunderstanding of how complicated such
terrains can be for those of us who want to alter them. Reviewing these two particular
anthologies alongside eachother raises, for me, some deeper questions about the very
idea of an anthology a nd t he role that anthology plays as socially interested text and
as a space of possibility. The editorial project, the contributing authors, their
disciplinarybackgrounds and personal profiles, the introductory essay, and the
1.M. JacquiAlexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminist Genealogies, ColonialLegacies, Democratic
Futures [NewYork: Routledge, 1997)and Leslie 6.Roman and Linda Eyre, Dangerous Territories: Struggle
for Dikferenceand E quality in Education (New York: Routledge, 1997).Thesebooks wi11 be cited in the text
as FG and D T, respectively,for all subsequent references.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Fall 2000 / Volume 50 1 Number 4
0 2000 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois

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individual essays all become in some way important signifiers of what an anthology
is trying to say and what it is also trying to do.
THE DITORIAL
E
PROJECT KNOWLEDGE
ASPRODUCTION
The editorial project for anthologies seems t o be inherently fraught by a
complicated mix of scholarly interests, styles, and collegal relations, and some
tactical and interested politics that intersect around something “at stake” in the
academy and the contested terrain of knowledge production. Anthologies after all for
the contributing authors do not rank up there as the kind...