Abstract
Recent scholarship that suggests the continuity of assaults on the Black body is often articulated from academic spaces. This should neither surprise nor comfort us. Whereas the academy has been an intellectual space which has been complicit in the physical and intellectual justifications of nonwhite inferiority, it has also emerged as the space where it is now en vogue to question the normative valuations of whiteness. But, has anything changed? Are there any contradictions in such an ordering of knowledge? This paper examines how the original understandings of Blackness have been filtered into the ways of approaching and understanding African-descended people in the contemporary, neoliberal academy. Whether through the constructions of ethnic studies, the opening of the social sciences and humanities, or the development of liberal approaches to race within university administrative practices, it questions whether or not the academy has abdicated its role as a third pillar of racial capitalism.
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Notes
These stories of course are legion. For varied discussions on the ways in which scholarly traditions around the Black experience developed within the academy, see inter alia, Meier and Rudwick (1986), and Wilson (2006). On the relationship between such traditions and the evolution of disciplinary Africana Studies, see Turner and McGann (1980).
“I was in Harvard but not of it and realized all the irony of ‘Fair Harvard.’ I sang it because I liked the music.” (Du Bois, 1940:37)
On Du Bois and the Black radical intelligentsia see Robinson (2000:185–240).
Ferguson explains: “…the ethnic and women’s studies movements applied pressures on the archival conventions of the academy in an effort to stretch those conventions so that previously excluded subjects might enjoy membership. But it also meant that those subjects would fall under new and revised laws. As a distinct archival economy, the American academy would help inform the archival agenda of state and capital—how best to institute new peoples, new knowledge and cultures and at the same time discipline and exclude those subjects according to a new order” (Ferguson 2012:12).
While the arguments of social commentators such as Naomi Schafer Riley (2012) deserve refutation, there are much larger issues at play. The argument here is that acceptance of the discipline is most evident where the fight for methodological autonomy in the study of the Black experience is conceded. In other words, mere acceptance/acceptability is not enough. As Ferguson’s (2012:19–40) work shows, acceptance/acceptability is often evidence of the reordering of power.
Richard Iton’s (2008, pp. 13–15) conception of “modernity” is useful in clarifying these relations.
This intellectual thrust has been present in much of Jones’s statements about the uniqueness of Black political thought. See his recent collection of articles, which range over his four-decade-long career in Jones (2014).
These elites are of course complicit in the maintenance of the status quo. For another perspective on the ways in which this has been, to use the words of Roderick Ferguson, “reordered,” see Curtis (2013:79–82), especially his contention that universities have increasingly used both precarious labor (i.e., adjuncts) to dispense with potential dissenters and have supported innovation under the rubric of academic entrepreneurialism that does not threaten capitalist hegemony. While Curtis is less willing to concede that the university is a viable space for dissent, despite these difficulties, Rodriguez (2012) has recently argued that the politics of the university go beyond neoliberalism and that the latter is merely a symptom of the its colonialist roots, which better explain its racial(ist) political economies. Works that discuss the corporatization of the academy include inter alia, Slaughter and Leslie (1997), and Washburn (2005).
See inter alia (Hawkins, 2013).
The recent court cases on affirmative action clearly indicate the ways in which rightward political shifts have affected the status of Blacks in higher education, a status which is at best the guarantor of “diversity” in a still largely Western-oriented academy and at worst sources of menial and exploited labor. An incisive intellectual history of Black Studies would show that these were not the major goals of the Black student movement or any of its precursor influences. On the pyrrhic victories of affirmative action court cases in the context of elite university education, see Bell (2003). On the outcomes of Black Studies as the diversification of academic subject matters and the professoriate, see the analysis of Biondi (2012:270–271).
For an overview of the Enlightenment idea of human nature, see Aaron Garrett (2006). Anthony Pagden argues in a more recent work that such depictions of human nature were part of a larger pursuit and that of displacing God as the ultimate determinant of human reason and destiny. In creating a secular foundation for knowledge, Pagden (2013: xiii and passim) suggests that the pursuit for norms of natural law, even as they problematically conceptualized non-Western humans that were supposedly in different stages of development have led to common, international norms for justice and human rights, for him, one of the more important outcomes of the Enlightenment. In other words, human differences are not as important as the fact that all can be Enlightened. For Pagden, the intellectual traditions that led to oppression of these nonnormative subjects are considered perversions of Enlightenment ideals, which the philosophes would have “abhorred.” Pagden’s work joins a number of recent texts that are attempted to “rescue” the Enlightenment from critical theorists of all ideological stripes. See, for example, the massive trilogy of Jonathan Israel (2001; 2006; 2011).
Wynter, following Foucault (1970), understands the nineteenth century as the era of an important shift in political and economic consciousness that gave rise to the human sciences (i.e., philosophy, economics, and biology). Importantly, Wynter (2006) shows that Black/Africana Studies emerged to counter this intellectual progression, since it reduced those of African descent to “the nigger” or irrational other. On the intellectual development of the American university in the late nineteenth century, see Veysey (1965:2–3).
This was identified as early as 1937 in the position of historian Lawrence Reddick (1937:22–25) who decried the “liberalism” inherent in the historical approaches toward the African American experience. Calling such approaches that were rooted in the “prevailing spirit permeating the American mind,” at best “superficial” he argued an approach that was more broader than American exceptionalist narratives of progress and for a truer representation of the influential forces shaping and determining African American life. Pointing to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America as an exemplar, Reddick had early argued for a methodological break with US history’s decidedly nationalist (patriotic) tendencies, among other fatal flaws aped by African American historians.
Contra the pursuit of “Gods not our own,” a phrase derived from S.M.E. Bengu quoted in Hilliard (1995: 60).
The assumptions underpinning maronnage were seen as ultimately about preserving one’s “ontological totality,” Robinson (2000:171). See also Hilliard (1995:54) where maronnage is described as linked to the purpose of “survival and cultural continuity” (emphasis mine). For more extensive background on the phenomenon of maronnage, see inter alia, Price (1973) and Diouf (2014).
The most well-known attempt to put this sort of approach into practice has been what has been various called the Temple Circle or Temple School of Afrocentricity that emerged from Temple University’s Department of African American Studies with the arrival of Molefi Kete Asante, Kariamu Welsh, and together with C. T. Keto and others, the creation of the first Ph.D. program in the field in 1988. For a sense of this perspective in theory, see Asante (1988) and (1990). The most useful critique of it remains Outlaw (1996).
This has been a consistent critique of what Perry Hall (2000) labels the “integrationist” and to a degree, the “transformative” (e.g., historical materialist) paradigmatic tendencies within Africana Studies. Since Hall’s essay, an increasingly liberal/postmodernist interpretation of the Black experience has become for many doctoral-degree granting departments, the core of the discipline. See inter alia, Patton (2012).
See Carruthers (1995:102–106).
See also Carruthers (1999).
The familiarity of this tradition is evidenced in its continuity throughout the diaspora and the modern world. Among other thinkers, Michael Gomez (1998:54–56) asserts the immense impact that Fon-Ewe-Yoruba spirituality has had in the making of the New World African.
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Myers, J. Racial Economies of Academia: Africana Studies as Arbiter. J Afr Am St 19, 79–90 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-014-9291-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-014-9291-8