Margaret (Peggy) Heller, Dr.
Dr. from the Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, Ohio
BA (Lakehead), BA, MA (Dal)
Associate Professor of Humanities
Faculty Member, Foundation Year Programme
University of King’s College, Halifax
Peggy Heller passed away June 20, 2011
Heller has taught for a number of years in two interdisciplinary programmes in the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. Both involve a consideration of ‘the Western tradition’. The first-year Foundation Year Programme studies the intellectual tradition of the West, and the upper-year Contemporary Studies Programme studies critiques of that tradition. She considers the premises of both endeavours through a recent doctoral thesis on the conceptual history of the West.
Research Plan for Politics and the Arts: “The Concept of the West and National Identity”
Heller’s research treats ‘the West’ as an object of theoretical and historical inquiry. For what exactly do we mean by the West? Most who use the term do not reflect upon its content, yet its meaning is not entirely self-evident.
After all, the West does not refer to a place that can be located on a map. Countries such as Australia, Israel, Japan and South Africa have often been treated as part of the West even though they are geographically close to non-Western nations, while European countries to the east of ‘core’ Europe are considered only dubiously Western. And while the West evidently names a distinct civilisation, culture, or tradition, there is no agreement concerning its character, which is thought by some to represent everything that is rational, creative or humane, and by others to represent everything oppressive: economic exploitation, sexism, racism, fascism, nihilism, or logocentrism.
Heller argues that the West now does not refer to anything determinate, and that instead each particular use involves a certain theory about global politics and world history. Thus the West is a political and social concept, perhaps even functioning as a kind of master concept of twentieth-century modernity, informing the comparative and evaluative dimensions of our conceptualisations of culture and civilisation, nation and society, history and modernisation. The concept of the West is the locus of identity politics on a large scale.
As part of the Politics and the Arts team, Heller intends to explore critiques of the identity politics of the West, particularly as these critiques appear in literature. After September 2001 we have been presented with new sets of oppositions along the established pattern that contrasts Western civilisation with barbarism. Yet the very reach of claims for and against the West puts into question the notion that we belong to distinct, self-generating and competing cultural wholes. Now we need as much as ever to question the terms by which we pit two totalities against each other, either from pro-Occidentalist or anti-Occidentalist positions, or as proposed by Western or non-Western thinkers.
One model for such a questioning is the novel, through which writers have examined the dilemmas of cultural identity in the context of modernisation and globalisation. Through their descriptions of alienation, ambivalence, inauthenticity and hybridity, through their evocations of the sense of being split, of being in-between, and of being burdened or blessed with a double-consciousness, novels perform inter-cultural exchanges in such ways that are not representative either of the West or of ‘the Rest.’ They allow for the possibility of overcoming the cultural chauvinism that underlies the celebration of “our” Western tradition and its denigration in the name of cultural authenticity, and therefore they contribute to an alternative conceptual apparatus that is less polarising than the one that has led to the theory of the clash of civilisations.