Review Essay: Me and the Devil Was Walkin' Side-by- Side: Demythologizing (and Reviewing) the Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement The Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement Corey W. Dolgon, Tania D. Mitchell, & Timothy K. Eatman (Eds.) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017 Dan Sarofian-Butin MERRIMACK COLLEGE Volume 24, Issue 1, Fall 2017 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mjcsloa.3239521.0024.116 [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/] “Legend has it,” the editors of the Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement begin their concluding chapter, “that Bluesman Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads…[and] sold his soul to acquire some of the best blues guitar chops ever known to humankind” (p. 527). The editors are referring to Johnson’s famous song “Crossroads Blues” and are suggesting, not too subtly, that the community engagement field is on the verge of making a similar Faustian bargain. “If we are, indeed, at a crossroads,” the editors write, “it is our hope that this book gives us a conceptual and strategic map of possible options for redemption and justice, short of any deals with the devil” (p. 529). Specifically, “this volume can be of value in the decision- making process…by recovering a radical and justice-seeking legacy…to address these dangerous times” (p. 528). These dangerous times, the editors intone, are fraught with peril. “Men and women…desperate for greatness,” they write, “become susceptible to temptations of many kinds…[welcoming] the certainty and the reprieve of the devil’s promise” (p. 527). The editors warn us to steer clear: “Contemporary satanic pacts often come disguised as institutional rationalizations or professional trappings, funding pressures or personal blind spots. But make no mistake about it; dressed-up and rationalized processes generally represent bureaucratic entrapment, corporate hegemony, and neoliberalism” (p. 530). This handbook, they suggest, is thus positioned as a defense against these temptations, a modern-day talisman to secure the future of service-learning, the academy, and society writ large. There is a problem, though, with this editorial narrative. Robert Johnson didn’t go to any crossroads in rural Mississippi at midnight. He didn’t meet the devil. He didn’t sell his soul. He just wrote a song. This is, of course, about more than just a song. This is about a myth; a myth of Johnson’s transformation, success, and boundary-crossing. It is a myth used and reused, repurposed and attenuated by different generations for different purposes. Levi-Strauss (1955) argued that myths function by explaining the cultural contradictions imposed by binary cultural beliefs (such as the raw and the cooked, sacred and profane, dirty and clean). And Derrida’s (1966) analysis of Levi-Strauss pointed out that all such seeming universals are themselves engaged in an exercise of nostalgia-making, attempting (but never fully succeeding) to erase the particularities of