Beyond Negated Identity: Mediating the World History Classroom through Adorno's Negative Dialectics

Abstract This article centers on Adorno's negative dialectics to account for experiences of alienation and marginalization within the world history classroom. It begins with the problem of how marginalization occurs in high school world history classrooms with predominantly Black and Latinx students. Adorno's negative dialectics helps answer the following questions: How can one attend to difference within world history in a manner that does not essentialize difference? For teachers with many students of color, how can one address experiences of marginalization without reducing that experience to an identity of inferiority? I introduce the prevailing “Hegelian” dialectical model of world history and how it informs curriculum. This provides the backdrop for Adorno's reinterpretation of the dialectic through the terms “identity” and “nonidentity.” Negative dialectics enables attention to difference in all its complexity, not just folding difference into the dominant narrative but examining the relationship between identity and difference.